Yonkers

I had traveled by Greyhound from Albany to New York City. From the Port Authority bus depot, I walked over to Grand Central Station. My friend Patty had told me which subway train to ride to take me up to her place in Yonkers. I found it and boarded,  heading north into the night. For some reason, I got off the train at the wrong station. Now she had been very insistent that I was only to disembark at the one particular station, so when I called her from a pay phone (this was way back in 1972) and told her the station I was at, she freaked out. “Oh my God! Stay right there, do not speak to anyone or even make eye contact with anyone, I’ll be there within half an hour.” Anyway, she and a girlfriend showed up and whisked me away to her family’s home. I don’t recall the name of the station where I had gotten off the train, but she said it was a really bad place frequented by some nasty characters, and she was glad that nothing untoward had happened to me.

Cold Reading

Back in the bad old days, I would often go climbing in the winter on overnight trips. The days were short and the nights were long – sometimes it would be dark for 15 hours straight. There’s not much to do while lying in your sleeping bag in a tent – I certainly never felt the need to sleep that long. One way to pass some of the time was to read. I didn’t want to have my head inside the sleeping bag with a headlamp so condensation would build up from my breathing. So, I’d hold the book in my hands but outside of the bag. If the temperature was really low, you couldn’t do it for long because your hands would get cold quickly. You’d have to stop reading, put your hands back in the bag until they warmed up, then continue reading with hands out in the cold air again for as long as you could stand it. A good trick I read about was this: if there were 2 of you in the tent, you could take turns reading, so that the non-reader could be warming his/her hands inside their bag while the other read.

Amount Of Risk

How much risk does your hobby involve? I’d say that if your passion is playing chess or tennis, quilting or writing novels, then that doesn’t involve much risk. However, by contrast, climbing is probably one of the riskier activities out there. Every time you head out to climb something, you could hurt yourself or even die. Of course, years of practice make you much better at it and lessen the chance of something untoward happening to you.

If you challenge an experienced mountaineer with the task of traveling through difficult terrain and climbing a peak or two along the way, they will probably come through just fine. Pluck someone off the street with no prior experience and set them to the same task – well, there’s a good chance you’ll be hearing about them on the evening news, and not in a good way. Mountaineering is not for the faint-of-heart and is definitely a skill to be admired.

First Ascents 

The farther back you go in time, the easier it was to be the one to do the first ascent of a mountain, but why is that? Several reasons come to mind. There were fewer climbers back then, which meant that there was less competition to do those peaks. Years ago, before we had such tools as GPS, satellite photos and mapping apps on our phones that showed your exact location at all times, you had to rely more on orienteering skills such as being able to use map and compass. There were no cell phones or SOS rescue devices, which meant that you damn-well better not get into trouble in the first place. Yes, there were more unclimbed peaks out there, but you needed more skills to reach them, climb them and get back home in one piece. Maps were of poorer quality back then, forcing you to have and use those skills at a higher level. Access to the peaks was poorer long ago, so you really had to make a commitment  to getting at them, but for those who were prepared to do so, there were a lot of delicious peaks to be plucked, a lot more low-hanging fruit than exists nowadays. New routes can be put up peaks even today, but the real prize of being the first person to ever stand atop a mountain, period, is certainly harder to attain.

Caving

I have done very little caving, or spelunking as it is more properly called. It hasn’t really appealed to me very much. There’s something creepy about being in a realm where there is a total absence of light. Also, there’s the thought of getting into a difficult spot and needing to be rescued – yikes!

I was once in a remote cave in a seldom-visited area. Deep within the cave, I came to a place where, in order to continue, I had to go in sideways standing up. It got so tight that I had to turn my head to the side in order to fit. I was skinny at the time, and I doubt I could fit through the passage now. These many years later, I still remember my heart pounding as I squeezed through that narrow spot. I was with 2 friends, and we were all skinny so we all made it through. We had to come back the same way later on, and although we had been through once, it was concerning to do it again. Nowadays, there’s no way I’d ever put myself in such a position again.

Falling

The length of a fall is of little consequence – it’s the sudden stop at the bottom that is the real cause for concern.

Burma Bridge

Most people have never heard of a Burma Bridge, let alone seen one or have tried to walk across one. They’re an odd sort of thing, primitive but highly effective. Allow me to explain.

A proper Burma bridge consists of 3 cables strung across a stream or river. One lower cable is where you place your feet, and the 2 upper cables are for each of your hands. The picture gives you the idea, but ignore the V-shaped loop that joins the 3 cables together – most Burma bridges you’ll find out in the wilderness won’t have that connection. The 3 cables form the cross-section of a V.

When using a Burma bridge, you start out confidently enough, but as you get out over the rushing water, the bridge starts to sway, the roar of the water seems to get louder as your nervousness increases, and finally an optical illusion sets in. You are forced to look down to see where you’re putting your feet, but when you do, you look beyond your feet to the rushing water below. Soon, you get the impression that the bridge itself is racing upstream. If you are one of those who is affected by vertigo, or are the nervous type, you can become mesmerized by the experience. The best thing is, like a tightrope walker, not to look down at your feet. Some people are totally freaked-out by trying to cross one of these. There is an even more primitive form of a Burma bridge, where there are only 2 cables – one for your feet, and an upper one for your hands. These are even harder to use. Here’s a picture of a friend crossing one of that type. He makes it look easy, but it’s not for the faint-of-heart. Notice he has the waist strap of his pack undone – in case he fell into the rushing whitewater below, he could wriggle out of the pack to minimize his chances of drowning.

Pen Pal

When I was 12 years old, one of the teachers at the Catholic school I attended suggested I might like to have a pen pal. She gave me the name of a priest and told me to write to him and introduce myself. So I did. His name was Father Gervais L’Abbé and he lived in the African country of Lesotho, working at some remote mission out in the hinterlands. We struck up a correspondence that lasted for a few years, and it was kind of fun learning about his life and work. In one of his letters to me, he included a short note written by a boy who must have thought that, because I lived in Canada, I must be rich. The boy asked me if I could send him a camel-hair coat. I think I actually responded, saying that I did not have the means to do such a thing. The relationship with my pen pal fizzled out after that.

Miserable Night

One of the worst nights I ever spent was here in the desert one winter. I had climbed a peak in the afternoon and been caught out in a cold rainstorm – by the time I returned to my truck, I was soaked to the skin. For some bizarre reason, I had worn blue jeans to do the climb, and had not brought a spare pair of trousers with me. I decided to wear the wet jeans in my sleeping bag overnight in the hope they’d dry out by morning, as I’d need to wear them for an early climb the next day. I shivered miserably all night, cold and uncomfortable, and hardly slept a wink. Even by morning, the jeans still weren’t dry. I never made that mistake again.

Short Cuts

Many are the times when I’ve climbed a mountain and, once it came time to leave the summit and head back down, I decided to take a short cut. In other words, to descend by a different path, in the hope that it’d save time or effort. With the advantage of being up high and looking down on the terrain below, it’s easy to think you see a different way down than the path you used to climb up, one that has fewer obstacles or is shorter. Sometimes you can see almost the entire way down, but there might be a bit of the way that’s hidden from view. So you might roll the dice and try it anyway, but sometimes it doesn’t work out – you might get stopped by a cliff you can’t downclimb, or a stream or river you can’t cross, or a crevasse you can’t cross, or a spot where rockfall or avalanche danger is just too great. Short cuts can be hard to resist, and can get you into trouble if they don’t work out.

White Out

The term “white out” when used in weather often means that the sky is overcast and the ground is snow-covered, and the landscape may appear entirely white with no visible horizon. But I remember one time on a climb, I had a situation that was different than that, but I still called it a white out.

I was at 14,000 feet and on my way back down the mountain, when clouds rolled in and were so thick around me that I couldn’t see the sun, and couldn’t see more than 5 or 10 feet in front of me. It was like a thick, solid fog. I had worn crampons along that stretch on the way up, but the snow was so hard that the sharp points of the crampons had only left the tiniest impressions in the surface. The path I was traveling was quite level.  It was before the days of GPS, and I hadn’t marked my path with wands or anything else for the return trip because the visibility had been really good on the way up. I had just assumed it’d be good on the way back down – big mistake! I was wearing sunglasses, but I found that if I took them off, I could crouch down and by squinting in a certain way, I could sometimes make out the pinpricks that the crampons had left in the rock-hard surface, but it was hit-and-miss. I was literally on my hands and knees for hundreds of feet following what I felt was the right path back. I had a map and compass but they weren’t of any help. I had to get back to a certain spot where I’d make a major change of direction to get safely down the rest of the mountain. Eventually, the thick clouds dissipated, and enough visibility returned that I could proceed safely, but I’ve gotta tell you, I was sweating bullets for quite a while.