Best "type II fun" adventure?

I'll start this thread by describing what the classes of fun are.

Type I fun: Enjoyable while doing. Think 5.8 hand crack and super mellow enjoyable climbing.

Type II fun: Enjoyable only afterwords. Those long alpine days where you move for 16 hours usually turn into type II fun by the end of it. Ice climbing up a waterfall that is actively running is another type II fun activity.

Type III fun: Never thought back on as enjoyable. Think bivying on a ledge with just your t-shirt in 30 degrees with 70 mph winds. That sort of fun.

So mountain project I ask of you...What are your top Type II (or Type III if you want to share) types of adventures. Extra points for those of you who supply video/photos of said adventure.

I personally had a type II adventure this past weekend and made a short video about it that is located below. A buddy and I had decided that we wished to do a 23.8 ski traverse through Yellowstone National Park from US Highway 191 to Mammoth, Wyoming. This path would take us through Fawn Pass to Mammoth. We assumed that we would be able to ski down the other side of fawn pass once we had skinned the 10 miles to get there. We ripped off our skins....and were able to ski less than a mile from the top of the pass. We reattached our skins and got back after it....yielding 23 miles of skinning in about 16 hours. After the sun set the temperature fell to -9 with no moon to guide our way. Luckily the air was calm and windless...which actually created its own problems. We donned headlamps that were immediately cut to 1/4 of their lumens every time you took a breath and the fog from that breath rose in front of the light source. We skinned for 5 hours like this never really knowing if we were going the exact right way. At 11:30PM we finally skinned into Mammoth (After walking the boardwalks in our ski boots for half a mile because there was no way directly into the town). I was unable to walk with much ease for the next 3 days. Fun day!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2paw9ivDjyQ

I was introduced to the "types" of fun concept by Gil Weiss who was a certifiable beast, superhuman, and all around good guy. Unfortunately, he pushed type 3 fun too far and died with his friend Ben Horne on Palcaraju in the Cordillera Blanca last summer. Gil(do) might suggest this was type 4 fun.

My type 2 and 3 fun experiences have all involved non-climbing related activities such as self-supported, long range mountain bike trips like the Kokopelli Trail in Canyon Country or multiple canyon tours in the Wasatch. The Eastern Sierra offers the possibility of type 2 or 3 fun ratcheting down a notch because even the longest days can end in a hot spring!

5 years later, I'm contemplating my second single push go at the White Rim Trail. With a plastic quart sized bottle of Yukon Jack to fend off the hoary night and a much lighter bicycle, maybe it won't take me more than 5 years to forget how type 3 fun it was.

Get out there and have some fun!

+1 for Gildo & his Type 4 suggestion!

Matt, I think you and I had some Type 1 fun a few years back in Ouray with our superhuman / alien friend.

Type 2 fun would definitely be when I unicycled the entire Slickrock trail in Moab. After just completing a type 1 fun 3-month bicycle tour in Catalonia, I'd be interested in the White Rim push, provided we each carried our own bottle of Yukon Jack!

Type 3 fun has been any time I sit for a standardized test.

Although, Types 1-3 are the standards, I've always though there was space int he system from Type 4, Type 5, and even (sort of) type 6. Definitions might be as follows:

Type 4: So fun (i.e. not fun) that serious psychological trauma is the likely result. Years of therapy may be neccesary to overcome the PTSD. But it is still a form of fun!

Type 5: Generally fatal.

Type 6: Theoretical grade, like A6.

Type 2 Fun: Getting caught on top of Chimney Rock with 4 people taking turns on one rap in the wind, thunder, lightning, rain, and hail. I've got some pics of that around here somewhere...

Made for a great story and an even better excuse to have an extra beer and a pizookie afterward.

Not sure why it seemed like a good idea at the time, but a few years back my brother and I tried to do a ski descent of Sangay in Ecuador. It is an actively erupting volcano that involves three days of jungle bushwhacking to approach. The idea was incredibly hare-brained, and we bailed after the realities of trying to get big long skis through the jungle set in on the first completely miserable day. I'm sure skiing ice covered with ash would have turned into type III+ fun if we had been tough enough to stick it out.

Once the suffering began, we quit taking photos, but this was shortly after getting off the bus:

Another good one for me was a couple of year ago. I launched on a solo Desolation Canyon river trip on Halloween, and spent 7 days running a freezing cold river during occasional snowstorms. No one else had pulled a permit within two weeks of me - most alone i've ever been in my life. Great trip, but very cold, lonely, and scary when running the one rapid of significance - Joe Hutch after the flash flood changed it.

I've always heard that Type 1 is fun while doing, and fun later. Type 2 is not fun while doing it, but fun later. Type 3 is fun while doing it, but not fun later (like eating a whole bag of marshmallows... or the activity resulting in unwanted pregnancy). Type 4 fun is not fun while doing it, and not fun later... otherwise called not fun.

Unplanned overnight bivy 2/3s of the way up Gothics in the Adirondacks. Then the scramble the rest of the way up at dawn the next morning, followed by the hike out (about 6 hours), with a breakfast of one chocolate bar shared 4 ways. Not fun at the time, but an awesome story and kind of fun looking back at it.

Mine was probably the one in Costa Rica where where my wife paddled out the last half of the second day sporting the sutures I put in over her left eye. She's proud of that scar. I married well.

I know quite a few climbers who would consider a 5.8 mellow hand crack to be Type II fun (assuming there is a nice 5.11 finger crack to follow). I am not necessarily one of those climbers... just sayin.

climbing
Doing Edge of Time Arete on the Citadel (5.10+, 13 pitches; ~29 miles round trip, 8660' of gain) car-to-car while still recovering from my near epic on Evolution Traverse and with a climbing partner that felt the need to remind me that I was not climbing at the top of my game that day.

non-climbing
Riding across NE India for a month on an Enfield, which seemed like a good idea in concept, but in reality turned out to be a constant game of chicken with giant smoke-belching diesel trucks, cattle, pedestrians, and SUVs on crappy roads. Being an Enfield the bike was a pain to kickstart and continually fell apart. At each stop a crowd of 20+ Indian men would gather around to watch. This got a little old after a few days.

Kind of climbing related. We were pushing a cave, and really needed to climb this dome. So we enlisted another climber, and brought the drills in to aid up to the top. After about 6 hours of fairly strenuous caving, with multiple drops, rebelays, a tyrolean, and a tremendous amount of sticky mud, we arrived at the dome. Climber A started up the dome, which of course was over hung about 30 feet, and went through layers of crappy chert. At one point he placed a 1/4" rivet that went THROUGH a layer of rock. He made it to the top, and I seconded the pitch, each un-clip resulting in a fairly big swing. Eventually made it to the top, even though the rock is really a crumbling pile of junk.

There were 2 possible paths to follow, and since Climber A was pretty spent, I took the left fork while he sort of sat quietly. I got about 6 feet in, and felt a weight on my legs. I kind of yelled back, "hey... did a rock just settle on my legs, I feel some weight, but I can wiggle it with my toes" and I hear... "DO NOT WIGGLE YOUR TOES THAT THING IS BIG... CLIMBER C.. GET UP HERE NOW".

I sat there, kind of assessing the situation, I'm in a 9" high crawl at the top of a 80 foot dome, not able to go anywhere. There was some water in the passage, so I might be able to drink, and I was burning carbide, so I might have some heat. But... if things didn't go well... lets see.. 6 hours back out, maybe 1 hour to phone service, then rescue team 3 hours to get together and make it to cave, plus 6 hours in.... phew.. it was gonna be a long day.

Fortunately, with some leverage, they were able to get the rock off of me, and it dropped down the pit... and managed to NOT hit any gear we had left down there. Did a bit more exploring, then started the long long process of getting back out. It seems like most climbing projects in cave end up being type 2 fun....

Ryan Williams wrote:I know quite a few climbers who would consider a 5.8 mellow hand crack to be Type II fun (assuming there is a nice 5.11 finger crack to follow). I am not necessarily one of those climbers... just sayin.

Man, I don't care if who you are, even if you climb 5.14, if a mellow 5.8 hand crack isn't type 1 fun sumthin is wrong with ya!

Mine was probably when I climbed a 500 foot route that was cold, shady, and super windy... problem was, the first pitch was warm and sunny so I set off in shorts and a t shirt. The belays were truly agonizing and placing gear without feeling in my fingers was not fun, but after topping out into the sun and warming up I definitely recall it as one of my prouder sends.

David Gibbs wrote:Unplanned overnight bivy 2/3s of the way up Gothics in the Adirondacks. Then the scramble the rest of the way up at dawn the next morning, followed by the hike out (about 6 hours), with a breakfast of one chocolate bar shared 4 ways. Not fun at the time, but an awesome story and kind of fun looking back at it.

I'm intrigued ! How did this happen? What route were you guys doing?

Go climb the nose as your first aid climb. Type 2/3

Robbie Brown wrote:Go climb the nose as your first aid climb. Type 2/3

Isn't aid by definition sort of type II fun?

A few years back we went to do the "Gun-Sight Couloir" up the Maroon Bells... Dumb Idea in late July as it wasn't there. We had broken camp (at Crater Lake) at about 4am. I wanted to the ledge route (three hundred feet of easy climbing on chossy rock just to the left of the couloir) and my buddy wanted to go for a traverse of the Sleeping Sexton. It was early and we had a basic rack + rope so I agreed.

Dumb decision.

The Sleeping Sexton was a gigantic pain. Grass made every sloping ledge scary and it was a constant rappel and climb back up (we weren't even topping out on the ridge). We used a GPS and Map to try to traverse so that we didn't have to go up and down so many times... Didn't work as well as we thought it would. We bailed. The side facing Crater Lake had zero opportunities within a couple hundred feet of where we were. The side facing Snowmass Mountain had tons of large stable blocks. We rappelled a total of four hundred feet before finding some nice ledges. We knew what we were rappelling into (having done the long Snowmass slog several times). We hiked for about four miles along the river and eventually to the trail. We then had to go back up to the ridge and to the lake. Just after the top of the ridge (it was dark and foggy) we had some people approach us and ask if we had any first aid stuff... My buddy told me he didn't have any because I always carried more than enough. This guy was cutting an apple in half and cut towards/in to his hand and cut the hand almost entirely from thumb to pinky. I patched it up and urged him to go get stitches. They were so happy they made us a small going away baggie of apples (no bloody ones), candy, etc. Nice people that learned the hard way not to cut towards/onto a body part.

We slowly made our way back. We got back in a downpour at midnight. It was a long day and we had weighed each decision carefully and made some great ones in the end. We were both safe. A few weeks later-we had beer and laughed it off. It was fun, totally alone with a sketchy (but backed up) rappel and some arguing that ended up hilarious. It was a fun exploration but I get to pick the alternate route next time...

Sometimes it's fun to get out of your comfort zone....

so far the best type II fun i've had is medical school...at least i'm hoping its type II fun and not type III

JCM wrote:Although, Types 1-3 are the standards, I've always though there was space int he system from Type 4, Type 5, and even (sort of) type 6. Definitions might be as follows: Type 4: So fun (i.e. not fun) that serious psychological trauma is the likely result. Years of therapy may be neccesary to overcome the PTSD. But it is still a form of fun! Type 5: Generally fatal. Type 6: Theoretical grade, like A6.

Would something like the Shakleton expedition qualify as T6 fun?

I think I could classify a good chunk of my canyoneering adventures as type II fun.