Welcome to the last hurrah for my Seiko SPB121 “Alpinist”, which unfortunately has been crowded out of the collection by the introduction of the Big Brother Brand Grand Seiko SLGH021 “Genbi Valley”. I can’t have more than one watch per watch “group” in the collection. It’s weird I know, but I stick to it. Therefore the Alpinist will shortly bid adieu, but not before one last spin through a day with it.

Freshly returned from my experience at Watches & Wonders, I decided what better way to fully take advantage of my jetlag waking me up at 4:30am than to write about my adventures through the Palexpo at a coffee shop? And so off I went, joyously unimpeded by traffic woes, to Merit Coffee.

The Alpinist sports Seiko’s 6R35 movement inside. The technical frustrations with this movement have been well documented on the internet, and I wasn’t spared my own share of gremlins either. I took it in one day to Vlad at ATX Watches to see what was wrong with it, and it turns out that when underwound, the amplitude drops (fancy way of saying the balance wheel doesn’t rotate enough before reversing, which itself is a fancy way of saying the watch ran about a minute fast a day). The solution was to treat my Alpinist like a manual-wind watch and wind it a bunch anytime before slapping it on my wrist. Not ideal, but I could live with it.

I had strategically scheduled an 8am meet-up with a friend of mine at Merit so that after a productive morning writing about watches, we shared a good time talking about church and missions-related things. By the end of our meeting, the sun was fully up and shining and I stopped a bit to smell some literal roses before departing for the office.

You may have noticed by now that the strap in these photos is not the OEM Alpinist strap. In fact, I detest the OEM strap and have never once worn it. However, I’ve started to realize that my sense of fashion, or the total dearth thereof, doesn’t play all that nicely with brown leather straps in general, which I think the Alpinist looks best with. I think I have to surrender to the notion that the green and brown rustic look is not for me, though I wanted it to be. What a serendipitous time to be exiting the collection then!

My company had a soft return-to-office policy that took effect April 1st. Sadly it was no joke, but was a pleasant surprise to be able to interface with my co-workers not via a screen. I’m all about type-casting watches to scenarios, and I gotta say, the Alpinist doesn’t necessarily scream sleek and modern and techy like my job warrants. It whispers rustic and quirky and adventurous. Or yodels it, because it’s weird like that (the cathedral hands still remain a head-scratcher for me here).

It also humored me to have a little photoshoot with the Alpinist while exquisitely knife-and-forking (not!) my lunch at Sweetgreen in the middle of a high-end shopping area at the Domain Austin. I think I was dragging the Alpinist a bit too far into Middle Class Fancy territory like wearing gym shorts to a Singapore Airlines first class cabin (can neither confirm nor deny I did this), but that’s just where my office is! I’m innocent! The next owner of the Alpinist owes it a good ol’ blue collar excursion to the forest at the very least.

The weather was perfect that day so I decided to take a little stroll around the Domain, but without iced coffee in-hand this time. I had too much coffee that day already, and I needed to undo some of the suburban shakedown I imposed on the poor Seiko.

Can we take a little moment to pause and think about the Alpinist’s emerald green sunray-finished dial?

Ok now that’s done, let’s now think about the oddities of this watch: aforementioned green sunray dial, cathedral hands, a date cyclops, a compass on the chapter ring, a crown at 4 o’clock to operate said compass, and alternating numeral-hash gold-PVD indices. There’s no way this combination of curiosities should work, but it does, and I would 10 out of 10 times rather pick the Alpinist if I had to choose between it or a Rolex Explorer *shudders*.

Anyway, after I got back to the office, I noticed I was starting to feel rather unwell. As a precautionary act, I packed up my things and left not long after, and indeed, I am a sick man writing up this very post just a few days later. Common cold, nothing serious.

After unsuccessfully trying to get a bit more work done upon getting home, I decided I didn’t want to cook dinner (a real bachelor surprise eh?) and decided some spicy level 3 chicken pad thai would work wonders for my sinuses. If I’m being real, the Alpinist approved quite a bit more being numbered with this food truck delicacy than the swanky mall+ food from earlier. Yes, I speak on behalf of watches.

I knew as a sick, jetlagged bloke I wasn’t gonna last too long into the night. I took a lume shot when it got barely dark enough, and I have to say as a $725 RRP watch, this lume straight outperforms that of way more upmarket timepieces. Definitely enough to strongly suggest that most of the $9100 I paid for my Submariner didn’t go toward the cost of lume application. You were supposed to read that with a slightly sardonic undertone by the way.

Quite certain I didn’t make it past 8:30pm before completely crashing. I wrote in a previous post how I was glad I had an Alpinist instead of a Grand Seiko, and I promise that if the SLGH021 didn’t exist, that statement would still be true to this day. But alas due to the rules of my Collecting Constitution, my time with the Alpinist comes to a close. It’s a good thing it’s not going far though as it’ll find a new home on the wrist of a good friend of mine. This is the Seiko Alpinist SPB121 reporting in for the last time, and bids thee, farewell.