As the seasons transition in the Rockies, everyone seems to shift their Stoke toward summer at their own pace. Some people sport climbing sunny south-aspect walls, others move high-and-north to keep ice alive. It’s a perk of living here, really. Our ‘shoulder season’ is a ‘choose your own season’, season. If you head west to the Columbia Valley, you can jump ahead a full month anytime you want.
The Fun Scale
You may have heard of the ‘Fun Scale’, enumerating three types of fun. Concisely, these refer to:
- Type 1 Fun - Fun the whole time. A day at the crag.
- Type 2 Fun - Not fun in the moment, but fun in retrospect. A day working hard in the alpine.
- Type 3 Fun - Not fun at all. A horrendous scree bash to a whiteout summit. An expedition where you froze and never left base camp.
Kelly Cordes seems to be the first person to have properly documented this scale, here: The Fun Scale
The Stoke Scale
I’d like to propose a Stoke Scale, which in many ways mirrors the Fun Scale.
- Type 1 Stoke - You’re stoked to do it, and you enjoy yourself once you’re out.
- Type 2 Stoke - You’re hesitant to sign up for it. It’s not your first choice. Your heart is elsewhere. But once you’re out, you enjoy yourself.
- Type 3 Stoke - You don’t want to sign up for it and you don’t enjoy yourself while you’re doing it. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily suffering or dangerous, you just don’t get fired up by the activity.
This scale can describe your relationship with any activity, but part of its utility comes in communicating these seasonal transitions. In mid winter, you might be Type 1 Stoked on ice climbing. But now that rock is an option, your ice-stoke is more Type 2. You’ll still have a good time if you go out, but you’d rather sign up to rock climb. Rock is now Type 1. You’re still not stoked for dry tooling, which was Type 3 for you the whole time.
An interesting dynamic here is the social shuffling that happens with these Stoke transitions. Intense mountain folk often seem to choose their activity first and their partner second. We spend our time in little cliques of Type 1 Stoke folks, for our current Type 1 activity. And sometimes that means your best friends are seasonal. Some people find this disquieting, but I think it’s more about living your truth.
For me, shared experiences in the mountains create a bond that stands the test of time, and those relationships pick right back up right where they left off when our Stoke re-aligns.
