Callaway Sprinkle — everything

Газ-Вода

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I sat in the cafeteria. No. 2, to be precise, named after Vasilyeev. You remember, Virgin Lands II, in the nineties? No matter. My hair was brown again, a neat job by the make-up folks this afternoon, and looked quite natural. Say what you will about consumer technologies, but anti-aging methods in the Soviet Union are terrific.

My stomach grumbled in spite of itself. They'd fed me this morning, but my plan had required me to skip out on lunch, so here I sat. The bowl of dumplings in front of me smelled delicious. They claimed they were made on-site instead of being re-hydrated this end. I was almost convinced. Certainly, it beat vacuum-packed potatoes and borsch squeezed from a tube. I bit one, completely smothered in butter. Yep, delicious.

Two tables over, a few well-dressed young men in glasses gawked upwards. It's not that the view wasn't astounding, but in my line of work I saw better. Frequently. Nonetheless, their reaction was amusing. Probably junior Party officials or even engineers, up for a meeting of young professionals or perhaps a diplomatic event of some sort, I thought. If I'd stayed with my retainers I could have asked about most anything on Noviy Mir, but that was precisely what I wanted to avoid today.

I took another bite of the dumplings. My grandmother used to cook like this, back when you could buy about twelve items at the corner store, before the tech boom and liberalisation in the early aughts. That would have been. . . I hardly remember now. Late Brezhnev, maybe a bit into Gorbachev?

Only three years had past since the Americans had their last hurrah on the Moon when I appeared, squalling, in a regional hospital in Ostankino. I was named Konstantin after my grandfather, but spent half of school pretending I was Gagarin instead. The other boys would tease me about it at Pioneer meetings.

You could actually pick out Moscow through the plate glass above at times. I liked it best at night, when the tracery of the city's roads stood out like a fuzzy bulls-eye, high-speed rail lines streaking off across the country. Leningrad, Kazan, Kiev, Irkutsk. You'd get maybe three minutes to squint down before the ground spun out of view.

I figured I had perhaps twenty minutes before they noticed I had wandered off. Time enough to eat my dumplings, and more besides. The butter-smeared bowl already stood empty in front of me. Another? I realised I'd better not. Every extra pound of weight was probably tallied and scrutinized by twenty doctors in Baikonur. I stood and crossed the cafeteria, resisting the urge to look about self-consciously. The less I paid attention to other people on the station, the less likely they were to pay attention to me. It's not easy being famous, even when disguised a bit.

What caught my attention first was the sign. ГАЗ-ВОДА, in cheerful, bold letters on the side of a tiny stand about the size of a Soyuz-10 toilet. I guess you could say I owed a debt to this ancient little place, or rather one just like it. I smiled at the woman behind the counter, probably another twenty years my senior.

"Good day, ma'am. Could I please have a large glass of the apple flavour?"

Moscow in the summer is absolutely sweltering. I got off the metro at VDNKh and walked the rest of the way to the youth centre, white shirt stained with sweat for the hundredth time that same week. I raised a hand to my brow so I could stop squinting for a moment, and I could see the heat rising in waves from the pavement. It made me feel almost sorry for the folks sitting in their cars, traffic stopped as it so often was. Then again, they had cars, so they didn't need my sympathy.

Finally I decided I'd had enough. I was close, but if I sweated the entire water content of my body out in the next few blocks, then going to the centre would be completely pointless. I slunk towards a stand at the intersection. Mother said that the first ГАЗ-ВОДА stations appeared in Moscow when she was still in university, and I almost believed it from how battered this one looked. Nonetheless, it was water, it was cold, and it was good. A little bubbly, a little sugary, a lot good. "Good day, ma'am," I greet the woman inside politely. "Could I please have a large glass of the apple flavour?"

I get my water and step aside to sip it. The slight shade the awning of the stand affords is terrific. "I'll take the same, thank you very much!" I look at the person in front of the window. He smiles back. Looks about my age, pale blond hair and typical blue-grey eyes.

"Dmitriy Lebednikov." He offers his hand. Strong grip.

"Konstantin Korolyov." I take another sip.

"Where are you off to?"

"I was planning on heading to the youth centre. A few friends from engineering school and I meet on Saturdays to play tennis," I explain.

"Oh, which school?" He seems genuinely interested.

"M. Logunov Institute of Engineering and Technology. Mechanical."

"Isn't that the cosmonaut school?" he asks innocently. I turn crimson.

His brow creases for a moment as he looks at me. I count two seconds before he flushes slightly in response.

It's the glasses.

"Oh, pardon me, I didn't notice, I–"

I cut him off. "It's fine. I tried to hide it for a while and it didn't work out. What about you, what's your job?"

Lebednikov smiled. "I was a pilot for the Army. My family did quite well during liberalisation, so I'm actually looking to be a cosmonaut now, with the expansion of the space programme."

At this I'm more interested. I clap his shoulder. "You want to come with me to the centre?"

"Why not?" He shrugs.

"Boys!" The stand proprietor turns her attention to us. "Those glasses aren't free, you know! Quit dawdling!"

I drain my glass and set it back on the counter. "Thank you." We set off together.

The Earth drifts slowly by below me as I sip my carbonated drink. The station's spin gives a bit of artificial gravity, and if I look up I can see the other wing of Noviy Mir always overhead as well. "Say," enquires the woman at the stand, "have we met before?"

"No," I politely decline.

"Then perhaps you've been on television!" She doesn't use the Web much, does she. . .

"Not a chance. I'm a regional Party official in charge of nuclear power operations."

"Mmmh." She turns back to something else.

Dmitriy and I had become friends almost instantly. We shared a love of science fiction and sports, engineering and ingenuity. We were each others' wingmen, in training and on the street. We were also trouble, just not enough to be an issue. But Dima re-ignited my passion for space because of his boundless curiosity. What was out there?, we'd wonder together, toasting the unknown in his tiny Moscow flat. But most importantly, it was thanks to him that I achieved my dream.

He had mentioned when we met that his family had done well. He neglected to mention how well. His father, Kirill Lebednikov, had made as much of a fortune as one could in the Soviet Union in the nineties. This made all the difference, because he could pay for corrective surgery. Dima convinced him to pay for me. The hated glasses disappeared.

In some ways, the destruction of my eyesight had been my doing. There was a small fault to begin with, but my refusal to wear lenses, coupled with exhaustive studying, exacerbated it. As graduation neared, my eyesight worsened. I flunked the cosmonaut testing completely in the end. Drunk myself into oblivion. Threw up. Lots. Eventually I went home to my parents, who consoled me, but pointed out I had a mechanical engineering degree from one of the best institutes in the country. I took the point and accepted a job locally.

Meeting Dmitriy changed that, and when I re-applied, eyesight restored, they took me instantly. Good political record, some experience in the interim with robotics, and connections. Dima and I spent years together, flew tandem for Soyuz twelve times, before they announced the Mars programme. As a pilot, Dima was selected early on, and was determined to be the best of the best. He wound up in command of the first manned mission to that planet ever.

And then the Molot booster lit up the night like a bright new sun.

I remember hearing the news about Molot-3. I was in Almaty at the time; I'd been given leave to travel there to give a speech to students in the local Kazakh school system. I imagine the accident was mercifully brief. Short-circuit in the booster. A flash. Nobody would have felt a thing, and the debris falling on the steppe contained no remains.

Perhaps thirty years earlier, they'd have covered it up. Radio silence. Post-glasnost, that was impossible. Baikonur drew immense flak. The Minister for the Space Programme too. They handed Dimitriy a Hero of the Soviet Union, posthumously, and called me up to receive it for him.

Those twenty minutes broke my heart. Dima had been training for that mission all his life. He commanded it. He'd have been the first man on Mars. Naming the landing site for his successors Lebednikov Base was no consolation. I wept enough tears for a lifetime then, and not once since.

I don't like to speak of any of this. On television I'm not allowed. Better to speak of loyalty to Party and State, or the legacy of my grandfather, an engineer in the Great Patriotic War. The spirit of exploration. Mankind's quest to know. All are acceptable answers, and I have them rehearsed perfectly, to retell and embellish as I smile with perfectly white teeth. After the Mars programme and then the wildly successful Jupiter missions, I'm practically the poster boy for the last twenty years of manned spaceflight. Perhaps not quite the cult sensation Gagarin was, but I've done well for myself. My parents agree.

Tonight, however, is the seventy-fifth anniversary of Sputnik. I'm intended to give an address at the banquet, televised live to the whole Soviet Union as well as globally. I suppose I'll still make it in time. My handlers will throw a fit when they discover I slunk off. It's not their fault, and I'll recommend they keep their jobs. But the spirit of exploration isn't long-winded Party addresses and celebratory toasts. It's out there.

It's also in here. Dima understood better than anyone why we fly. He re-convinced me. So I lift my газ-вода to the darkening curve of the planet below in a silent toast.

Man, this glass must be as old as I am!

Little Sister and Cinderella: the mock-guide finale

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

import PhotoFigure from '../../components/PhotoFigure.astro'; import manifest from '../../../public/photos/little-sister/manifest.json';

export const img = Object.fromEntries(manifest.images.map((i) => [i.id, i]));

For the final climbing day of AAI's AMTL 2, the roles flipped: Joel — who had spent two weeks instructing us — became the client, and I became the guide. Objective: the north face of Little Sister in the Twin Sisters Range, then a traverse to Cinderella, as a subsection of the larger Green Creek horseshoe. The Twin Sisters are a geological oddity — one of the largest exposed olivine massifs anywhere — and the rock climbs like rough-cast iron: featured, grippy, and hungry for skin.

In

Aimed to leave camp at 4:30; managed 4:45. An hour and a half on rock and heather to the snowline, crampons on, another hour and a quarter to the glacier, then roped travel to the moat at the base of the north face. Climbing by 10:00.

Five pitches of olivine

The first belay decision was the day's most consequential: pitch 1 (~25 m) went straight up the rib we'd gained across the moat, specifically to clear out from under a bank of hanging snow up-route — anchor at the first solid stance, belay Joel up, minimise the minutes anyone spent in the runnel. Pitch 2 (~30 m) finished the rib to where it flattens into the main face. Pitch 3 was the money pitch: ~50 m of steady, solid, generously protected climbing, stopped five metres shy of rope's end at an adequate ledge. Pitch 4 (~30 m) topped out the wall from a gendarme stance, and pitch 5 (~30 m) crossed a small rock saddle onto the true summit wall and up to the rock-pile on top. Summited at noon, an hour ahead of the guide-plan I'd sketched.

Down, across

The descent off Little Sister is a fourth-class gully system on the southwest face — managed as a mix of simul-scrambling and short-roping, with hip belays and the odd placement at three steps where the exposure warranted it. Half an hour of care brought us to snow; a glissade and a walk gained the saddle between Little Sister and Cinderella.

At the saddle we spent half an hour coordinating with another AAI party climbing Little Sister by the west ridge, offering to relocate their snow gear so they could descend our line rather than reverse the exposed ridge. They eventually declined — their climb, their call — and we set off for Cinderella.

Snow still hung on parts of Cinderella's north face, so we kept to the ridge: a fourth-class section short-roped, then a fifth-class traverse pitch to the true summit, and a reversal of that pitch back to the rappel station we'd scoped on the way up.

The anchor worth rebuilding

Closer inspection of that station was the day's best teaching moment: two micronuts in cracks — going nowhere, but not confidence-inspiring either. We left one of AAI's nuts (Joel's discretion) and, together with a cordelette we'd recovered from a horn on the Little Sister descent, built a proper equalised three-piece. Joel rappelled first — his idea to use the moat in the gully below as an anchor: some digging with the axe, the rope rigged behind the accumulated snow, and the second rappel cleared the bergschrund clean.

From below the bergschrund we re-roped for glacier travel, waited a few minutes to rejoin the other party, and descended together into the evening.

What the day was actually testing

Not the 5.6 — the decisions. Where the belays went and why; how long we lingered under hanging snow (as little as possible); when the rope came out on the descent and when it stayed away; whether an in-place anchor got weighted on faith or rebuilt on evidence; how two parties negotiated shared terrain. Thirteen hours of the job being mostly judgment, with some climbing attached — which is, I'm told and increasingly believe, the correct ratio.

Thanks to Joel for two weeks of patient instruction, and for playing the client with enough mischief to make the rehearsal honest.

From logbook entry 2026-06-17-twin-sisters--little-sister-cinderella-traverse · grades and timings as recorded on the day.

Comic 2.0, Black Canyon: the first log entry

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

We spent the last week of May in Montrose, visiting family and doing a bit of light hiking and climbing on the side. With an extra day at the end of the trip, I couldn't resist the opportunity to climb at least one route in the Black Canyon while there — and I can confirm I'll be coming back, in cooler weather, probably.

John Collis was kind enough to suggest the route and climb with me, including offering great feedback on my placements once I'd mentioned the guiding ambitions on the approach. Couldn't have asked for a better introduction to the canyon, and I'd recommend him without reservation if you're looking for a Black Canyon blind date.

The route itself was superb — easily among my favourite lines so far. Despite the dark whispers of choss and runouts one hears about the Black, as a well-trafficked route the rock and gear quality were excellent (with the exception of one chockstone that blew out under an enthusiastic pull). The pegmatite-banded gneiss is generously featured, making for great face climbing in addition to the cracks; the Lightning Bolt pitch was the highlight of the day, and I'm happy to have sent it cleanly.

Leading, and what the ledger says

I led pitches 7 and 9 through 11 — about a third of the climbing by length, onsight, flashing everything I followed. Route-finding on my leads was fairly straightforward, helped by John sketching what to expect above the Lightning Bolt crack.

Honest self-grade on gear: 85–90%. No placement was unsafe, but in perhaps five cases out of fifty there was a better stance or slot within a couple of metres if I'd cast about longer. Anchors were all solid. The day also added tools to the kit: belaying a follower on the Neox and a Nano Traxion rather than my usual guide-mode ATC, short-belay and simul technique for the fourth-class exit terrain, and rappel strategy at the one spot where the gully exit and Escape Pitches diverge.

Why this entry exists

This is the first report in the public log — the curated face of a climbing ledger that runs on structured records underneath. Every report from here on gets the same treatment: what we climbed, how it actually went, and what it taught, at whatever length honesty requires.

Reliquary Vertigo

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A collaboration.

Imagine, if you will, a Holy Beard Box of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) — or, if you prefer, the Hand of John the Baptist that dunked Jesus in the Jordan several millennia ago.

What does such an object mean?

That is, of course, a question of faith: which, what sort, how strong. Do you believe that Heaven intersected Earth in the object you regard? Was that intersection transitory, or does it remain a thinness in the veil? In short, can objects be sacred; if yes, how so? and how ought we comport ourselves around them?

I would class myself as relic-sceptical. Is this item all it claims to be? I wonder to myself as I stare at soft lighting and engraved metal. Certainly, the population average number of fingers for saints seems to be somewhat higher than for us regular folks. Part of that scepticism is then inextricably linked to an historian's healthy regard for how often piety and power have intersected, with "truth" the loser as a result. Another part, though, cannot be resolved by ironclad provenance: indeed, reducing doubt to a question of verification is a convenient way to sidestep the discomfort of what one should think when the relics are real.

My Presbyterian faith accords me another layer of scepticism, albeit a more optimistic one. If the only way to God is through Christ, no finger-bone or gallstone will get me closer; if the Spirit already dwells in the world and in me, then that veil is pierced more thoroughly than any prophet's staff or splinter thereof could contrive. That does not suggest that the miraculous happenings attributed to relics are impossible, merely that I do not believe the relic itself was the agonist: sola fide and all that.

The tomb of the prophet Daniel sits in Samarqand, Uzbekistan. It is black and gold and twelve feet long; surrounded by Islamic pilgrims; beautiful. My strongest experience of "reliquary vertigo" came as I stood alongside it, confronted the gulf between my tradition wherein it is but another tomb and that tradition where it means something more, and knew not how to respond. Seeing something suddenly from a different perspective is disconcerting, though your feet have not moved a step.

No relic brings me closer to salvation in and of itself; of this I am certain. But I think my hesitance to engage with the presence of these items has caused me to overlook ways in which they certainly matter. Regardless of their true origin, these are things that other people of faith, whether my own or another, have cared for, honoured, and cherished for many centuries, and as a testament of that faith they are powerful. When next I gaze through clouded glass at some fragment of a long-dead Church Father, perhaps I'll think more of all those who have stood in my place and feel something of their belief, their certainty, their nearness to the sacred. If I believe Heaven and Earth are not merely tangent in the lives of saints, but once more drawn back together by Christ, then I would do well to sit in that nearness not only in shrines, but in all the rest of my life thus sanctified.