On an overnight flight from Asunción to Miami, I was seated next to a delightful young Brazilian couple. When I asked them what they were most looking forward to during their visit to the US, they said “panqueques”. I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised, as we all need a pancake from time to time.

Food Fantasies

It’s funny how, when you’re deprived of something, you think about it so much. I’ve been on climbing trips where I’ve been out for many days and I end up spending an inordinate amount of time talking about food with my companions. It’s not like we were starving or anything like that, but camping food can be pretty basic and often bland. Sooner or later the conversation would turn to what you’d really like to eat when you got home. Hours could be spent discussing your favorites, comparing them to the preferences of your mates. If you’re tent-bound for extended periods, such as multi-day storms, it’s quite amazing the depth of detail you can get into, such as your favorite pizza toppings or the best Mexican meals you’ve eaten. You’d think that it would be really frustrating, fantasizing like that, but maybe the feeling of hope of eating those future meals as soon as you can overrides all of that.

Lucky Break

The whole trip was such a long shot. Two guys out in the dead of winter, heading out into the middle of nowhere, in an attempt to climb a peak that nobody had ever tried before. We had zero information on this ultra-prominence. The first day was overcast, and the second was worse. We climbed for hours in a total white-out, then finally broke out above tree-line. In two entire days, we hadn’t a single glimpse of our mountain. We made ready to pitch the tent in the late afternoon, hoping against hope that somehow we’d catch a break. This was long before the days of GPS, so we could only guess where we were in this snowy wilderness. Then it happened – for just a minute, maybe two, a gap appeared in the clouds below us. We had a momentary glimpse to a distinctly-shaped frozen lake thousands of feet below us, and I was ready with my compass. Bingo! With that bearing, coupled with our altimeter reading, we were able to place ourselves precisely on our topographic map before the clouds closed in again. We hoped for better visibility on the morrow, but at least we had the satisfaction of knowing where we were for now.

Super-Stealth

We had sneaked 23 miles into the bombing range and set up a campsite so hidden, we might as well have been on the back side of the moon. Such blatant lawbreaking, there wasn’t even a word strong enough for what we were doing. Every day we set out in a different direction and climbed our brains out, returning to camp before nightfall. Things were going well, but dawned day three with, little did we know, some serious drama in store. As the morning progressed, we found ourselves 6 miles out from camp. On a road very far from anything, a large military truck came rumbling over a rise up ahead. Shit – we were caught, in plain view out in the middle of the road! We ran out into the desert, making it about a hundred feet to a sort of hole in a small wash before the truck arrived at the place where we’d been first spotted. It stopped, and the soldiers got down and started looking for us. Time stood still, as every second we feared we’d be discovered. Our stealthiness, acquired from many weeks of climbing over the years in other parts of the bombing range, paid off. They never found us. Once their truck lumbered off into the distance, we dusted ourselves off and finished what we came to do, climbing 2 peaks that day before returning to camp. What a rush!

Screwdriver

Some years ago, I made my way to the summit of Peak 3325 in the Sikort Chuapo Mountains of Arizona. Great climb, beautiful day. It had been climbed by others before me, so I expected to find a climber’s register on the top. It’s usually just a glass jar with pencil and paper inside. Most people just leave their name, the date and maybe their home town. However, it’s up to you what you write on that paper. It could be anything. It might be a hunter saying he’s trying to bag a sheep; it could be a Border Patrol agent who made the summit in the course of his work. I’ve even seen undocumented border-crossers sign in. Sometimes people might leave a prayer, or a personal note of some kind. It’s not often that you’ll find some humorous comment in the register, something funny enough that it’ll make you laugh out loud, but I did that day. It was funny enough that I took a picture of it for my records. The entry said:

3/15/08   Tim Tibbets   Ajo, Arizona   Found this screwdriver halfway up the final pitch. Would somebody please shove it up George W. Bush’s ass?

It made me laugh aloud, and even better, the screwdriver was still sitting there!

Scary Climb

I’ve made it to the top of almost 3,000 different mountains in my life – more than some climbers, fewer than others. But I’ve gotta say that none of them scared me as much as the one I did with Andy Bates on December 10th of 2009. It was a beast called Montezuma’s Head by the park authorities, but its real name in the O’odham language is I’itoi Mo’o. It’s a technical climb, but not one that most rock jocks would bother with. Just getting to the start of the roped climbing involves a trek of 4.5 miles across the desert, then a climb up some 1,500 vertical feet of mountainside involving stretches of Class 3. If you do all of that, you’ll find yourself staring into the maw of the first pitch – it’s like something you’d expect to find in the depths of Mordor.

Picture this: you’re on the north side of the mountain. Think of that first pitch as a gully, maybe ten feet across and twenty feet deep, standing on end and almost vertical. Because of where it’s placed on that side of the mountain, the sun never shines on any of the rock in that pitch, ever. The rock is of poor quality, and the belayer is going to have to dodge bits and pieces loosened by the leader as he climbs. It’s hard to protect. There’s about 125 feet of climbing to do that first pitch, and it goes at around Class 5.5. Half-way up it, I got a leg cramp, which only added to the drama. That first pitch was, for me, bad enough, but not nearly as scary as the final moves higher up on that bleak, rocky tower. Yes, quite unforgettable.

Cristo Redentor

Years ago, if you wanted to drive between Mendoza, Argentina and Santiago, Chile you had to take an interesting path. Heading west from Mendoza, you eventually arrived at the hamlet of Puente del Inca. A few miles later, the pavement ended and the highway, if you wanted to call it that, became a gravel road and climbed steeply up the mountainside in a series of switchbacks to a mountain pass called Paso Internacional Los Libertadores. There, at an elevation of 12,572 feet stood the statue known as Cristo Redentor de los Andes. This 43-foot statue served as a monument to the peaceful resolution of the border dispute between the 2 countries. It wasn’t until 1980 that a tunnel was opened, eliminating 65 switchbacks, shortening the route by 6 miles, and lowering the elevation of the route by about 2,000 feet. How well I remember, though, the bus driving down that gravel road, making Z-turns to negotiate some of those tight bends, with its front end hanging over the edge to the accompanying oohs and aahs of the passengers.

High Airport

Normally, when you fly on a commercial jet nowadays, they keep the cabin pressure at an equivalent of about 8,000 feet elevation. This is comfortable for the passengers and not as difficult to maintain as keeping it, say, at something lower like sea level. Most airports are lower than 8,000 feet, so when the plane lands, they de-pressurize the cabin and you walk out into the normal air pressure of the airport. Easy, right?

Well, I’m not sure how many of you have heard of El Alto International Airport, which serves the city of La Paz, Bolivia. It sits at an elevation of 13,325 feet, making it the highest international airport in the world. I flew there once from Miami, and during the flight I checked my altimeter, which verified that our cabin pressure was indeed around 8,000 feet. As we were on our approach to land at El Alto, the captain started to slowly de-pressurize the cabin so that when we landed and the aircraft doors were opened, the pressure inside the plane was the same as at the airport. Most humans will never get up to an elevation of 13,325 feet in their lifetime, so walking into the El Alto airport from a plane can be quite a shock to the system of many people. I noticed that they had oxygen bottles and masks stationed around the terminal in case of a breathing emergency. Hopefully they don’t have to use them very often.

Bus Ride

Many years ago, while traveling in a foreign country on a tight budget, I discovered a fun way to get to entertain myself. I would get on a city bus at any bus stop and ride it all the way around its entire route until it returned to the spot where I had boarded. It was really cheap, I’d get to see a lot of the city and it was comfortable. I got to sit in a nice seat, there was no feeling of being rushed, and sometimes the driver would even allow vendors selling food or souvenirs to board for a short distance and hawk their wares. I did this in such places as Veracruz and Cuernavaca in Mexico; Valdivia, Chile; Bariloche, Argentina; Seville, Spain as well as other places. Both entertaining and educational.

Macaws

I had spent days in the oppressive heat of the thorn forest in southern Sonora. On my fourth day, in search of a village called El Tábelo, I got lucky and found it, then parked in the small plaza in the middle of things. I walked around and asked several villagers if they knew where I could see macaws. They directed me to the home of an elderly lady who quickly overcame her suspicion of this crazy gringo, sat me down on her porch and told me her story. She said that every morning, 2 macaws flew into town and would fly from house to house, begging for food. She described how, when one of them would land on top of her head and perch there, its huge claws would be a bit painful, even through her thick hair – she made a grimace, to show me how it felt. They liked fruit and flowers, and that’s what she gave them.  Unfortunately, just my luck, they had not appeared that day.

Sourtoe

From 1896 to 1899, Dawson City in the Yukon was the center of the Klondike gold rush. People from around the world traveled there under the harshest conditions in search of their fortune, but few struck it rich. The town has remained a quirky place to this day. When I visited in the late 1960s, it was de rigeur to stop in at the Downtown Hotel. This establishment was famous for a drink they called the Sourtoe Cocktail, and here’s how you became a member of a club that now numbers over 100,000 strong.

You buy a shot with a minimum of 1 ounce of alcohol (Yukon Jack is preferred), then pledge “the sourtoe oath”. The bartender then drops a dehydrated human toe into your drink. “You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow, but your lips have gotta touch the toe.” That’s all there is to it. Did I do it myself? Hell no – I’m not that depraved!!