Pretend Police

The bombing range authorities didn’t police their own land. Instead, they contracted with a civilian company to do the job, a kind of rent-a-cop. Those guys were a joke, though. They were never out after dark, they never drove any of the really bad roads, they never drove the most remote roads. Once, I failed to report in by phone ahead of time that I was going to be on the range, which is a no-no. I didn’t do it on purpose, I just forgot. They came looking for me. (I know this for a fact, because they questioned a climber friend of mine at the entrance to the range who had met with me earlier in the day and who told them I was heading in to do some climbing.) It was laughable. I was on a mountaintop and happened to see one of their very distinctive vehicles heading in my direction. It stopped well short of where I was, and I could see the two idiots walking around and looking for me – why there, I had no idea – my vehicle was nowhere in sight. They finally gave up and drove back out the way they’d come in, while I had a good laugh on my mountaintop.

Tarantula Hawk

Here in the Sonoran Desert lives an interesting creature called a tarantula hawk. It is very common – there have been many times when I have been out climbing and I have noticed that on the bushes around me there have been a dozen or more of these insects going about their business, consuming the nectar of plants.

They are large, 2 inches or so, and are a type of wasp. They prey on tarantulas by stinging them, then dragging them to their brood nest where they lay a single egg on the victim which will hatch to a larva and then eat the still-living prey. These wasps are not normally aggressive towards humans, but one time when I was messing around in a pile of construction debris and wearing open sandals, I must have pissed one off because it stung me on top of my foot. The pain was beyond belief, but subsided in a short while. Other than being painful, it is not considered dangerous. Here is a description that researchers posted online: The sting is the most painful of all insects. The pain is immediate, excruciating and unrelenting, that simply shuts down one’s ability to do anything except scream. It is blinding, fierce and shockingly electric. I always treat these creatures with respect, given my past history with them.

Missing Ticket

After spending way too much time at 20,000 feet on a big mountain in South America, I returned to civilization. There was no doubt I’d burned my way through too many brain cells up at elevation, because I couldn’t remember where I’d left my plane ticket for my flight home. I could have sworn it was in a duffel bag at a friend’s place, but nope. The airline said they could replace it, but there were formalities to be carried out. I would need a police statement saying my ticket had been stolen. Most helpful, they even directed me to a local constabulary which happened to be close to the hotel where I was staying.

What happened next was like something out of a 1930s movie. I walked over to the station and was directed to a dimly-lit desk where I met with a plain-clothes officer wearing a visor, a cigarette hanging from his mouth under a “no smoking” sign. He asked me many questions and as I answered each, he typed my responses by pounding away, one finger at a time, on an old-fashioned manual typewriter. Hours later, I left with the statement in hand and delivered it to the airline – all they needed now was to wait for approval from their main office in Asunción.

The Vaca Hills

One fine morning many years ago, I found myself wandering through a group of small peaks. It was a sunny day, the blue sky overhead was something out of a painting, birds were singing, flowers were in bloom – it couldn’t have been more perfect. There was something about the place – in retrospect, hard to put my finger on it, but something just a bit more special than usual, something about it that makes it stand out in my mind these 20 years later. The look and feel of the hills, combined with everything else around me – I know, I’m rambling here, trying to identify something that maybe can’t be exactly put into words. It appears that to this day no other peakbaggers have bothered to go in and experience what I enjoyed that fine morning, which is a shame – those 3 peaks really are special and are worth the effort to go in there.

Scary Mine Stuff

I was trained to look for mineral deposits, but knew nothing about mines themselves. My friend Andy, on the other hand, with his background as a mining engineer, knows all about deep, dark underground places that men dig in their quest for riches. He has no fear about exploring old mine shafts and tunnels, but such places scare the living daylights out of me. Arizona is littered with remnants of old mines, and I’ve crept up to the edges of plenty of them and peeked over, but they really creep me out.

One that I particularly remember was in the Copperosity Hills, at the old Greenback Mine. I came across the opening one winter morning – there it sat, out in the open, quite exposed. A person or an animal could have easily have fallen in. It wasn’t vertical, but rather at a steep incline. The walls were quite smooth. I was curious, so I pushed a rock into the opening and listened as it rolled down the shaft. The sound went on and on. I rolled another rock down, this time timing it with my watch, and was amazed that it rolled down that shaft for a full 21 seconds until the sound stopped. The rock, about the size of a soccer ball, was probably bouncing off mine timbers as it went down the shaft.

When I returned home, I called Andy and told him of my experience. He looked up some information on the mine, and learned that I had been at what was called the Pinal shaft, which was 688 feet deep at an incline of 50 degrees. That’s as deep as a 70-story building is tall!!! It makes my blood run cold just thinking of falling down that shaft. It had sat there, abandoned for 77 years before I came along. God help any creature that fell in, to die an awful death in the bowels of the earth. Do you see why these death-traps scare me so much?

Registers

A climbing register is usually a glass jar with a tight-fitting lid and a small book or a piece of paper and a pencil inside it. It is kept on top of a mountain, and anyone who reaches the mountain top can sign in. It is meant to be a historical record, if you will, of those who made it to the top. This type of information is mainly of interest to the type of climber known as a peakbagger, one who compiles lists of peaks they climb and keeps track of such things.

I have signed in to hundreds of these which I have found on mountaintops. I have also left hundreds of them myself on mountaintops where I found none. Sometimes, if I found one that was in poor condition, I would transfer the papers into a new register, or at least copy whatever information was still legible from the old register into a new one.

I was trying to recall what was the oldest register I ever found on a mountaintop. In the winter of 1977, I found a piece of paper in a metal can out in the open, completely exposed to the elements and sitting in the snow, with pencil writing on it from 1941. It had survived for 36 winters. I put it into a new weatherproof register, amazed at what I had found. In the years since then, I’ve found plenty of old registers – 10, 20, even 30 years old, but just offhand I can’t recall any that were older that that one lying out in the snow back in 1977.

I can’t help but wonder how long some of these registers might last if they’re well taken care of – sealed inside good jars, kept inside metal ammo boxes or buried inside good cairns. Only time will tell.

Septic Tanks

When I was in high school, sometimes on a Saturday my uncle would hire me for the day to help him do an unusual type of job. His son Gary would do this work with me so I wouldn’t have to suffer alone. Instead of hiring a backhoe, which would have cost him a lot more, he paid each of us a buck an hour to dig, with pick and shovel, a big hole at a construction site. The hole was meant for a septic tank. As I recall, the hole was about 7 or 8 feet long, about 6 feet wide and at least 6 feet deep. It would take us all day to dig, a good 8 hours. Sometimes there’d be good-sized rocks we’d encounter, but usually not so big that we couldn’t wrestle them out of the hole. Gary and I got along well and we’d make a fun day of it. We never failed to finish the hole by the end of the day. I know the money meant a lot to me and I could use it to help out my mother with expenses at home.

The Winter Storm

We knew it was coming, the forecast promised as much – I foolishly talked us into going anyway. A threatening overcast greeted us from the start. We made good time up the west slopes, covering 3,000 vertical feet pretty quickly, all of it on unfamiliar ground. We topped out, tagged the summit and decided on an easier route down, one that might be friendlier if the weather backfired on us, and it looked like it was about to.

Ugly black clouds had been approaching from the west, the ceiling had been lowering for hours and our luck had run out. We had barely left the summit when the first drops of icy rain hit us. As we descended, so did the clouds, so quickly that we could barely stay below them. The rain became steady, the temperature around freezing, we were soaked to the skin. We had to lose 2,000 feet to reach the pass, where we hit an old road. From there, we could put our minds in neutral and simply walk like a couple of zombies to lose that last thousand feet to reach the truck. Normally, we’d talk or joke to pass the time as we moved through the mountains, but not today. This was grim. We were truly hypothermic by the time we arrived, the worst I’ve ever been. We fired up the heater in the truck and stripped off our wet clothes, lucky to have made it. It could have ended so much worse.

Yerba Maté

If you’ve spent time in Argentina, Uruguay or Paraguay and been fortunate enough to have socialized with the fine people who live in those countries, you may have been invited to participate in the lovely custom of sharing yerba maté with them. It involves putting dried leaves of a plant into a cup, called a mate, and pouring hot water over them, then drinking it through a metal straw, called a bombilla. The cup is passed from one person to another. It is very personal and is a bonding experience. One of the best articles I have read that describes the benefits and the history of the custom can be found here and I hope that it remains online for a long time because it is so well-written.