Lava Flow

In the summer of 1990, I spent a month in Hawaii. At the end of July, I found myself on the Big Island and, fortunately, I had a rental car so could move around at my leisure. It was a big news item at the time that the Kilauea volcano was erupting. Lava was flowing and devouring everything in its path. On the southeast corner of the island, it overran the small community of Kalapana. Nothing could stop its advance. Hundreds of people like myself had gathered to watch the spectacle, and it was heartbreaking to watch the lava creep up to someone’s house, burn it to the ground and finally envelope it. During the day, there was nothing stopping us from walking right up to the lava if we wished, and we did. I remember palm trees igniting and burning like torches. Some of us stayed around and watched the spectacle until late at night. By the next morning, though, the authorities had become afraid that someone was going to get hurt or killed by getting too close to the orange-hot lava, so they made a rule that nobody could approach any closer than 1/4 mile. Well, that took all of the fun out of it and the crowds thinned out. Here is a picture I took that morning, where we see the lava causing steam to rise up as it enters the ocean. It was engulfing Kaimu Black Sand Beach along a 400-yard front. The lava ate up a 150-foot depth of beach, measured from the forest down to the water, in 10 hours.

Lava entering the ocean.

Looking back on the experience these many years later, it was pretty unique. There probably aren’t too many places in the world where today you could just stroll unhindered up to the edge of an active lava flow.

Why Climb?

Climbing definitely isn’t for everyone, but it’s how I have wanted to spend my life. It makes me happy. It’s just one more human activity, and I know I’m not saving the world. I don’t think it’s necessarily the best sport out there, but it has been the best one for me.

UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) recently stated that “Alpinism is not only a physical activity requiring athletic qualities and technical expertise, but is also an art. That the personal engagement inherent in alpinism, the sense of self-responsibility, the knowledge and respect for the mountains, and the strength of the social relationships, make alpinism an “Intangible Cultural Heritage” of outstanding universal human and social value.”

I couldn’t agree more!

Math Test

In 1963, a curious thing happened at my high school. All those of us who were Seniors and taking math were asked to take a math test. Now there’s nothing odd about that, on the surface, but this was a different kind of test, and I’ll explain what I mean. A math test had been devised in the United States and distributed to all high schools in the US and Canada, and all students who were in their senior year and taking 12th-grade math were asked to take the test. There weren’t a lot of us, maybe 25 or 30 of us in my school.

The test was composed of multiple-choice questions. At my school, none of us had ever been asked to take a multiple-choice test before. Such tests were frowned upon in 1963, at least in Canada where I lived. We always had to show our work on math tests, to prove we knew what we were doing. Before we started the test, our math teacher explained to us how the test would be graded, and it was pretty tough. If you picked the right answer, you got a point; if you didn’t pick any of the answers to a question, you got no point; if you picked the wrong answer, you had a point deducted from your score. Yikes! That was pretty harsh. If you didn’t know the answer, you were actually better off not picking any answer at all, because every one you got wrong actually counted against you and lowered your score. Our scores would be given as a percent, not as a letter grade.

The makers of the test had included, as a prize for the student with the highest score in each school, a nice pin. So, we all sat for the test, and it was pretty tough – many of the questions dealt with math that we had never yet studied at our school. It was not pretty – we were really sweating bullets as we worked our way through the test. To guess at the answer or to just leave it blank? – that’s the choice each of us faced as we suffered through the test, each of us in our own private hell as we dealt with a test that was way beyond our ability. When the allotted time was up and we handed in our tests, we all knew we had done poorly.

Well, guess what? When our teacher had finished grading our tests, he announced the results, and lo and behold, I had the highest score in our class! Holy crap, I wasn’t expecting that. But there would be no awards ceremony for this one, Folks, because my score, the highest in the class, was – are you ready for it? – a whopping twelve percent. The teacher handed me the pin quietly in the hallway and that was the end of it. I think he was as embarrassed as I was.

Trading Comics

When I was a kid, about 13 years old and living near Montreal, a favorite pastime among the boys I knew was trading comics. Each of us had a bunch of comic books, and once you had read each one, that’s it – it was time to move on and get fresh ones. You’d meet up with a friend and show him the ones you were willing to trade, and he’d show you his. It was pretty simple, really – a one-for-one trade. You’d then read all the ones you’d gotten in trade, and they were then fair game to be traded to someone else. I don’t recall that any of them seemed important enough to want to keep permanently. Some of them got pretty dog-eared after changing hands a number of times, but as long as a comic book hadn’t fallen apart, they were still good to trade. That was around 1960, and I’ll bet that some of them would be valuable these days. Of course, we didn’t know then that that would ever happen – all we cared about was reading fresh comics. By the way, all comics cost 10 cents apiece if you bought them new in 1960.

Night Canyon

It was our eighth day of a backpacking trip in a remote mountain range in the Arizona desert. We only had enough water left for this one day, and were relying on finding a cache of 3 gallons at the end of the day, which was still many miles away. There were 3 peaks to climb on this last day, strung out over a lot of distance, so we figured we’d better get an early start. We hid our gear and headed out with just day packs.

It was still pitch-black as we left camp by headlamp. The drainage we planned to follow was right beside camp, and all we had to do was drop down into it and follow it west upstream. It was a dry wash, and right away we found ourselves in a sort of canyon. The walls were close to us on both sides, were up to 50 feet high and quite steep. Even if we had wanted to climb out of the canyon, which we didn’t, it would have been difficult. It was an eerie feeling as we continued for a full mile in the canyon, in the dark, until finally we found its source on the side of a mountain. As we climbed up out of it, the first light of dawn grew in the east, but we could still look down into the inky canyon as it meandered across the desert below. It had been a very unusual mile, to say the least.

Sierra de la Nariz

Among all of Arizona’s 193 mountain ranges, 5 of them cross the border into Mexico with their highest point in that country. One of them lies in the Tohono O’odham Nation, and it has the curious name “Sierra de la Nariz”. I wondered why it had that peculiar name, but I think I’ve finally figured it out. Have a look at this photo.

The picture shows the range as seen from the northwest. It’s actually just one long ridge, about 11 miles long. Of those 11, almost 10 of them are south of the border in Mexico. To get to the range’s highest point, you need to walk a distance of 2.7 air miles into Mexico along a sinuous ridge, crossing over no less than 9 distinct bumps in the process. So back to the name. I think it is called Nariz because that word means “nose” in Spanish, and it could be argued that the ridge resembles the narrow bridge of a nose. So that’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it.

Never Very Cold

I’ve been climbing here in the desert for 38 years now, and when I think back on all of the climbs I’ve done in our cooler winter months, I have to say that it wasn’t all that cold when I did them. Oh sure, there were some days when the temperature dropped below freezing, but once the sun was up and shining on you, it always felt pretty warm. Even if it’s only 60 or 70 degrees, the sun here this far south always seems to have a lot of strength, enough to work up a good sweat on a climb.

El Paseo

In July of 1972, I found myself in the town of Pichucalco in the steamy lowlands of Chiapas, Mexico. I spent 2 nights there in a flea-bag hotel, and the only saving grace was that on Sunday evening I heard music playing outside. My room overlooked the plaza, or main square. During the course of the evening, I saw people dressed in their finery, involved in a ritual that I had never before seen. Young men were walking in a circle around the plaza in one direction, while young ladies were walking in the opposite direction. Most of them were walking with a friend of the same sex and holding hands.

Someone later explained to me that if a young lady catches the eye of a young man, he may pause as they pass to offer her a flower. If she keeps the flower on the next pass, that means that she accepts his attentions. The third time around, the young man will step away from his friends to walk and talk with her. All of this takes place under the watchful eye of her family and the rest of the village. If the young man wishes to court the young lady further, he must first approach her father for permission.

This happened over 50 years ago, so I have no idea if such a custom still persists, but I found it quite interesting and charming.

Old Tiles

During one of my visits to Argentina, on a July day I took a 6-hour bus ride to the village of San Ignacio Miní in the province of Misiones. The Jesuits established a mission there back in 1610, and it was abandoned in 1768 and reclaimed by the jungle. After it was re-discovered, about all that was left standing were the ruins of the church, which have been somewhat restored. It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984.

When I was there in 1991, one thing that struck me in particular were the stacks of curved red clay roofing tiles that had been salvaged. They had adorned the roof of one of the buildings four hundred years earlier. In my home town of Tucson, red clay tiles are still used today on some roofs in new construction. The tiles I saw that day were in perfect condition and could have easily been used on a new roof. For the life of me, I can’t think of any construction material we use today that would survive that long.