Crevasse Sleep

The day was wearing on – we knew we’d lose the light soon, and we were all out of options. At 9,000 feet on the glacier, if we went up any higher we’d be at a col where the wind was howling – we could hear it, sounding like a freight train coming at full throttle. That’d be an insane place to stop – we’d never be able to pitch the tent, and even if we could, it’d never survive the night – the wind would tear it to shreds. In front of us was a huge crevasse, but not the kind that makes you wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. The deeper parts were mostly filled in with snow, so much so that we could safely walk down into it. We picked an area where its bottom was hard-packed snow, fairly flat, and seemed thick and secure. It was there that we set up our small two-man tent.

The weather held. It didn’t snow overnight, and the temperature didn’t drop below 10 degrees F. so it was comfortable enough, but the wind came looking and found us hiding in that crevasse. It snapped that tent fabric like a whip. As God is my witness, neither of us got a wink of sleep all night long. It was a relief to flee our crevasse at first light and feel that same wind at our backs pushing us up the last few thousands of feet to the summit.

Prankster Bosses

I worked at a sawmill where some of the bosses loved to play tricks on the new guys who hired on. One of the things I remember they would do was this: one of them would send the poor guy over to another boss to ask him for a knot puller or a board stretcher. Of course no such things exist, and they’d send them over when the other crew was having lunch in their break room. Naturally, great guffaws of laughter would result. This would only work with someone who was usually quite young and gullible.

Sulphur Smell

Have you ever been climbing and dislodged some rocks that have rolled down and hit other rocks which then released a strong smell of sulphur which you could smell right away? My understanding is that there are minerals in the rocks that react to the force of being struck. I’ve noticed it lots of times.

Grateful For Meds

My climbing in Argentina was finished, and I was playing tourist for a while. Staying in the same hotel as I was in the city of Mendoza was the U.S. cycling team, both men and women. One of the women mentioned to me that she was battling a terrible case of diarrhea that she just couldn’t get rid of and feared that it would affect the performance of both her and the team. Before I left the States, I had consulted with my doctor who had prescribed a number of medications for my first-aid kit that could be really useful while traveling in South America. One of those medicines was for diarrhea, and I think it was Lomotil. I gave her the entire bottle of pills. I was happy to learn that it cured her problem and she was soon cycling with her team-mates again.

Ragged Top

Don’t you just love it when a mountain has a name that fits its appearance so perfectly? There’s one close to home that’s like that. Here, have a look.

Everything you see in the above photo are all parts of the mountain we call Ragged Top. The highest part of it is on the far left. There’s a route up it on the other side which most people use, and it’s not all that hard. The elevation is 3,907 feet, and it requires a climb of about 1,500 feet from where you park your car.

Post Office

One time in a small town I was stopped on the street by a man who asked me if I could direct him to the Catholic post office. “I beg your pardon?” was all I could reply. I was baffled. He repeated his question. I told him that I knew where the post office was, and also the nearby Catholic church, but I had no idea what he meant by the Catholic post office. He asked me one more time, in deadly earnest. Then, seeing how completely puzzled I was, he started to laugh, admitting that he had pulled a fast one on me.

Shit Brindle

My Dad sometimes would describe a thing as being the color “shit brindle”. He was the only person I ever heard use the expression, and I always laughed when he would say it. So today I took the liberty of looking it up on the internet, and lo and behold, there it was. Here is what I found. An unpleasant or common and boring color of brown, in reference to eye color, hair color, or just the color brown. Commonly used among older generations. Thinking back on the times he used it, that seems about right.

Terrifying

It happened in an instant. I took one step up in the narrow gully, a step not unlike so many others, then everything was moving under me – there was no warning. My partner was a few feet below me and fortunately off to one side. By the time everything stopped moving, after only a few seconds, I had been dragged down and brutalized by several of the rocks. Even now, as I write this more than 3 years later, I can still feel them rolling over and under me. Miraculously, the one that could have killed us didn’t. The monster, the size of a large refrigerator and weighing 7,500 pounds, had rolled out from under me and ground to a halt 50 feet below us down the slope. It was not our day to die.

Priorities

Mountaineering is a high-risk activity. As age finally overcomes enthusiasm, as our priorities change and living is more important than a summit, then it’s time to appreciate what’s been accomplished and proceed to the next challenge in life.

Hell-Hole

The third-world village was unbelievable. It didn’t have a landfill – it was a landfill. Garbage was moved away only as far away as one could throw or drop it – it was everywhere. As much as the garbage assaulted the vision, it was nothing compared with the human waste that burned the nose. Feces piles littered the ground around every building and along walls. Scrawny mongrel dogs and ugly birds inspected the filth for what they could scavenge. Hygiene was an alien concept there.

Pinboys

I was born in 1947, and lived in a small town in my high-school years. Our town had a small bowling alley, and besides the movie theater, it was the only entertainment in town. In the early 1960s, there was no automated equipment in that bowling alley, so they employed pinsetters, sometimes called pinboys.

The boys would sit on a ledge behind the pins and after the bowler had bowled their first of two allowed turns, they’d jump down and reset all the pins if the bowler knocked them all down (called a strike), or if there were a few pins remaining (called a spare), they’d leave those standing and collect the others and drop the ball into a return track, giving it a strong shove to send it back to the bowler for their second and last turn. As the years went by, bowling alleys switched over to semi-automatic equipment and finally fully-automated equipment like they use today. Being a pinsetter wasn’t without its risks, though. A pin, or even a ball, could fly up and hit a boy and injure him.

Dollar Symphony

When I was attending university in Vancouver, I learned of something special offered to students. The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, a very good one, had a Sunday afternoon performance during their concert season. If you showed up at the ticket office within a short time before the concert started (I think it was within 15 or 30 minutes before the performance started), they would sell you a seat for a dollar. It would have to be a seat that hadn’t been already purchased, of course. I often took advantage of this student discount, and I don’t recall ever being turned away – there were always some unsold seats that were available. Even as a starving student, I could scrounge up a dollar. It was a real bargain – riding a city bus down to the concert hall and back cost 50 cents in itself.

Scary Spot

Back in 2005, Dave and I made a trip to the Mesquite Mountains. Over a period of a few days, we climbed some great desert peaks. Working our way south closer to the Mexican border, we reached a clearing along the road and were shocked to find what I’m about to show you. There were quite a few pickup trucks and SUVs, and they had all been shot full of holes. Many of them were upside-down, as if they had been traveling at high speed and the drivers had lost control. Quite a few were all burnt up inside. None of them was drivable. What had no doubt occurred was that warring Mexican drug cartels had had a massive shoot-out in this place. We were only 5 miles from the Mexican border, and it was easy to drive from Mexico into the States. At that time there was no vehicle barrier or any of Trump’s border wall out in that very remote and unpopulated area. It was a wild and lawless area, and Bad Guys could travel with impunity there. Even though Dave and I had been in such places as this before, it was still shocking to see the mayhem around us that day .

Lady Cabbie

One time in a city of a million people in a foreign country, I had my hotel call me a cab. When it arrived, I saw that the driver was a young lady. She informed me that of the 600 cab drivers in the city, only 5 of them were women, and that like many things in that Spanish-speaking country, it was a very male-dominated society. There was a lot of sexism that she and the other women drivers had to deal with. Costs were so low there that a cab ride all the way across the city, almost an hour, came to under a dollar in US money. I gave her a tip much bigger than the fare itself and wished her well.

Nasty Bathroom

I was in a country that shall remain nameless. One afternoon, I badly needed to use the bathroom and I found one that was open to the public. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there were no toilets. Instead, there were holes in the concrete floor in the men’s bathroom. If you had to do number two, you planted your feet on the painted foot outlines on the floor and squatted and did your business. There were no stalls, it was all open as one big room, and there were several pairs of painted footprints. You picked a spot, dropped your drawers and let her rip. There was nothing to hang on to for support. Hopefully you weren’t shy, as you were in plain sight of others there for the same reason. What made it seem even more unusual was that there were female bathroom attendants, whose job it was to hand you a few squares of rough toilet paper as needed. If all you had to do was pee, there were urinals for that purpose. Well, as they say, if you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go. My need was great, so I had to get over any shyness in a big hurry. It was customary to tip the attendant, as they had to manage the toilet paper and hose the place down from time to time, as you can well imagine. What a job they had! I went out of my way to never put myself in a position where I had to use such a bathroom again.