OH, LORD!

Dinner

It seems now that all of my sins of table and tavern are destined to come back to haunt me!  I have only recently discovered that I am afflicted with an industrial-grade case of type 2 diabetes.  The probable cause is a lifetime of pushing the alcohol limit, probably assisted by my craving for red meat and fried foods.  Whatever; from now on I must eschew booze in any form; yes, sob, I am permanently on the wagon.  Furthermore, what I eat must change drastically.  This morning I had an interview with a very nice young nutritionist.  She didn’t give me meal plans; rather, she explained a pie diagram guiding my nutrient intake.  For instance the upper right quadrant contained suggested proteins – fish, lean red meat, beans, etc.  This I can handle.  However, sprawling across the left half of the pie was a list of vegetables that I must ingest – and nearly every entry was from my lifetime compilation of “foods to be avoided at all cost!” 
  

No more sugar, no more vodka, no more French fries, no more German chocolate cake!  Hello, carrot sticks.

And thus does Providence reward a life lived carelessly!

Memoir 14: Road racing

Not me, but I have felt this way from time to time

I spent a good part of my fifth decade training for and running road races.  Elsewhere I have written that the only athletic activities that I could have hoped to excel in were those that took lots of effort and training; no actual talent required.  Where distance racing is concerned, it is possible to become fairly proficient by prolonged, herculean effort – even if you have short legs and thick bones.  You will note that all the men winning important marathon races these days are about six feet tall weigh about 85 pounds – and hail from the oxygen-deprived highlands of East Africa.  I was 5 ft. 8, weighed about 150 pounds, had short legs, heavy bones, and did my training at sea level in the misty  climate of NW Washington.   This is not offered as an excuse, merely a fact.  I am rather proud of my running career, considering my lack of hereditary advantages.

I stumbled into road racing through Bob Keller (he of my mountain adventures).  Up to the mid-1970s I got my exercise playing tennis.  I really loved that game – but I had to stop playing, owing to a chronically painful back.  To keep from getting fat, I took up jogging on the track at Western Washington University.  Bob sometimes ran there as well.  After a month or so I got so I could run a few miles without stopping to rest.  Somehow, Bob had learned of a short road race to be held on nearby Lummi Island – a fund-raiser for their library, I believe.  He suggested we both enter (I think he wanted me to drive.)  We did, paid our ten dollars (and got a T-shirt!), and did our best.  I was happy just to finish (I think it was about four miles), and it seemed like half the island’s population beat me.  But, wonder of wonders!, it turned out that there were age divisions, and that I had somehow finished second in the 40 to 49 group.  And I won a little trophy!  I was hooked.  From then on, for about 12 years, road racing was by far my main outdoor pleasure, and collecting ribbons and trophies became a compulsion.  To this day there is a box somewhere in my basement, absolutely stuffed with ribbons.  Alas, not many are blue – but some are.

So, from then on I trained perhaps 20-25 miles per week.  I would run six days/week, mostly on country roads.  Between important races I would drop down to ten or fifteen miles, and then build gradually toward as many as 50.  I estimate that, between 1974 and 1985 I ran about 12,000 miles*.  I was never bored, and I felt great.  I could eat as much as I liked, of anything, and drink all the beer I could lay my hands on.  So what if I fell asleep a few times while giving Geology 101 lectures; the students were mostly asleep themselves, anyway! 

*This may help account for the fact that I now (2019) have two artificial hips and one artificial knee – and that my “good” knee is hurting more every day.

Seriously, I believe it is true that only college professors and other unemployed people can properly train for long road races.  Some people get up before dawn and hit the streets, rain, fog, wind – or all three at once.  I could fit in my training around a few lectures and a weekly faculty meeting. And if it were raining I could run on the track, rather than sloshing through mud puddles.  Big advantage!

For more than a decade, then, I ran every road race I could find within commuting distance of Bellingham.  Mostly they were 10K’s (ten kilometers), with a few 5Ks or ten-milers thrown in.  Some of them were well known – the Chuckanut Footrace, for instance.  Such well-known events pulled in good runners from Seattle and Vancouver and points nearby.  These guys would take home all the more desirable  ribbons (blue, red, etc.) and leave people like me with ribbons with green stripes and pink polka dots for, say, seventh  place.  But when they didn’t come, I usually could pull down at least third in my division (it was called the Masters Division, but sometimes felt like the Geriatric Division).   It quickly became apparent that, the longer the race, the better I scored. 

So, I ran perhaps ten half-marathons, including a huge one on Mercer Island where I finished second (in my age division, of course).  I started twelve full marathons, and finished ten.  The first I had to abandon was the Birch Bay Marathon, where I went out too fast and found, at about mile 20, that whenever I stopped for a drink I would start to pass out.  Virginia made me quit.  My worst actual full-marathon time also occurred at Birch Bay: realizing that I was going embarrassingly slow, I stopped in a road-side grocery store, bought a can of beer, and walked across the finish line, drinking it – in exactly four hours.  I caught hell for that smart-aleck performance.  The organizer, who was a friend, threatened to bar me for life.  The second bail-out was forgivable; I had eaten nothing but refried beans the night before, and you can guess the consequences.

My best time was a little under three hours; 2:57.17, I think it was.  That is pretty slow for a real marathon runner, but a noteworthy accomplishment for the likes of me.  I am tempted to bring up the short legs and heavy bones again but for the fact that my friend Tom Read, a WWU math professor, who was shorter than me, had shorter legs, and bones at least as heavy – once ran about 2:35!  People have taken videos of him running, and nobody has ever seen his feet touch the ground. 

I guess my proudest accomplishment in road racing would have to be the Skagit Flats 50 miler, run in the summer of 1981, when I was 48.  I had no idea how to run such a race.  Bellingham happened to have in its citizenry an authentic elite ultra-marathoner, in the person of my friend Jim Pearson.    Jim did not register for the race, but his brother Don did, and Jim ran along to pace him.  Also accompanying Don was his beautiful wife, on a bicycle, wearing very tight shorts.  Well, hell – what to do.  I decided to follow the Pearsons: Jim would set the proper pace, and Don’s wife would give me a way to get my mind off my misery.  This worked great for about 35 miles, at which point Don abruptly quit – and I was on my own.  Heck, now what?  I figured that I would poop out and die pretty soon myself (although I felt good), so I started walking every so often and otherwise dogging it.  Finally, I found myself at 47 miles with plenty of energy still in the tank.  I happened on a young fellow out for a jog, and challenged him to a race for the last few miles.  He beat me, but I took perhaps a full minute off my time.  The upshot was that I finished third overall, first in my division – and was even ranked in Runner’s World for a few months!  However, from that point forward my running career went steadily downhill.

When I finished that 50 miler I felt fine.  I sat around, shooting the breeze, and drinking Gator Aide – and then got in my car, eased onto Interstate 5, heading for Linda’s place on Lake Samish.  About half way there, at 65 miles/hr., I started to pass out!  I managed to get to the side of the road and sit there, head buzzing, until it was safe to drive again.  Maybe this was nature, telling me that 50 miles is a bit far.

So, in retrospect, running was good for me.  It kept me thin and healthy and gave me something to aim for nearly every week-end.  I know that many people say that they run because it makes them feel better, cleanses the soul, relaxes them, etc., etc.  I ran to win ribbons!  (And to collect T-shirts.)  When I reached 50 it seems that my joints began to rebel, my lungs shrunk, and I became more attuned to pain.  As a result, I wasn’t winning ribbons any more.  So I quit – and turned to mountain hiking instead.  Ignoble, yes, but honest. We are what we are, and I’m competitive.

Memoir 13: How I earned my living

Paleomagnetic field work

This may be me.  I can't be sure.

After reading about cool hikes and hair-raising adventures in the mountains, a history of my “adventures” in science will be pretty dry.  However, it’s part of the story, so here goes.

I have covered some of my work history already – for instance, my efforts for the Beaumont Hardware and Lumber Company.  In some ways that was more fun than anything I have done subsequently.  For shear personally satisfaction, driving a truck beats drilling rocks or giving lectures pretty much any day.  However, it pays a lot less – and, although I was a very bad truck driver, I was pretty good with rocks.  So I will skip that part.  My second “career” was with the U.S. Army, in which I served 1955-57 is subject of an essay all its own, which I have covered already, so I will skip over it, too, and go straight to: GEOLOGY.

You might well ask, “why geology?”  Well, there were three reasons.  First, my mother’s family had been into mining – and thus geology – for several generations.  For all my growing-up years I had rocks thrust into my face, accompanied by the question “Look, Myrl, Jr., isn’t this interesting?”  Actually, it almost never was the least bit interesting – but it made me acutely aware of the science of geology.  Second, my best friend at Caltech – Sam Sims – went into geology and always seemed to be doing fun things.  And finally: like most young people I thought that working at geology meant healthy and exhilarating rambles in the mountains, with only short trips to the office now and then.  As an aside - it doesn’t.

Anyway, when I got out of the army (1957) I went back to Stanford to get a Ph.D. in geology.  I had graduated from Stanford with a B.A. in economics, and I had only one course in geology on my record, so this promised to be a long haul.  Fortunately I had all the required math, physics and chemistry, from my Caltech year, but I still had to do most of the B.S. requirements, and then the graduate work.  No sweat: I was young; I had pretty good financial support from the school, no kids, and a working wife.  So I went at it hammer and tongs and made excellent progress.  Then I hit a mental roadblock.

It seems that, to get a Ph.D., you have to pass an oral examination, and also orally “defend” your thesis.  It is hard to believe now, but at that point in my life I was terrified of talking in front of anybody but close friends.  (Now, of course, I think it’s a kick in the pants.)  I watched other grad students get marinated, skewered, and roasted on a spit by the Stanford geology faculty.  Most of them passed eventually, but the process absolutely terrified me.  So, to my eternal shame, I bailed – took an M.S. (using the research I had already started), and went to work for Standard Oil Company of California, in Oildale, near Bakersfield, California.

My thesis, by the way, concerned “paleomagnetism” – the permanent magnetism often retained by rocks from the time they come into existence, and what you can learn about the earth by studying it.  It turns out you can learn a lot of things, many of them important, and some undetectable in any other way.  But more on that later.  As it happens, I was nearly a founding father of that scientific art. 

Chevron, of course, didn’t give a fig about paleomagnetism.  I had an M.S. from a top school, good grades, and took showers every few days, so they hired me at the going rate – I think, about $6000/year.  (This must have been about 1961,)  They set me to doing the most pedestrian, most mind-rotting sort of stuff – basically, matching up “well logs” from one drill hole to another, and trying to construct a sub-surface structural map therefrom.  Yes, yes – I know it was important.  But it also was poison for the soul – or, at least, to my soul.  I suspected that, if I stayed with Chevron, eventually I would make a lot of money.  I also realized early on that the oil business could be extremely absorbing, and potentially rewarding even in a non-monetary sense, if you regarded it as a business.  But, at that tender age, I wanted to be a real        SCIENTIST!  (Sometimes I second guess myself.  It would be nice to have $100 million to donate to ovarian cancer research.  Or even $1 million.  But, no – on balance I was far better off in pure research.)

So, after only about one year with Chevron I got the offer of a position with the U.S. Geological Survey, in Washington, D.C., and I jumped at it.  By now I had two kids, a pregnant wife, and not much money.  The job required me to live in or near Washington, D.C., which is an expensive place.  Furthermore, I took a pay cut.  But the work was far more interesting, and gave me a measure of independence.  I did field work all over the place – from Virginia to Minnesota.  None of it particularly shook the earth, but it was a solid beginning.  And all the time my poor wife, Virginia, had to cope with three kids and relative poverty!  I would have been content to stay with the USGS for the rest of my career except for two things: I didn’t want to live on the east coast, away from “real” mountains, and my boss was slowly giving me ulcers.

My boss was a self-made leader in geophysics – trained as a mathematician – who all but gave birth to the art of aeromagnetic surveying   His name was Isadore Zeitz.  Izzy was branch chief for the Regional Geophysics Branch, which was supposed to do practical surveys and experiments, leaving the more cerebral stuff to the Theoretical Geophysics Branch.  I desperately wanted three things:  to get into the other branch, get back west, and get away from Izzy.  Izzy was loyal to his troops and always willing to help, but his idea of management was to open your office door, turn blood red, and shout.  He never seemed to be relaxed, and he frequently seemed greatly outraged.  His face was usually a dull red in color.  We all thought he was a heart attack just waiting to happen.  Izzy died last year, at the age of 96.

Well, I applied several times for a transfer to either of the two other regional centers for the USGS: Menlo Park, California, or Denver, Colorado.  Other people got transferred, but they usually did so by using one powerful tool – they would threaten to quit and go to work for a university.  But I couldn’t make that threat: I lacked the proper union card, a Ph.D.  So I was stuck.  Finally, in desperation I took a leave of absence from the Survey and enrolled at U.C., Riverside, where in 1969 I finally earned that all-important union card.

But, then, having qualified for a university position, I decided to see what such a job was like. 

There were two vacant positions on the west coast at that time: San Diego, and Bellingham.  I chose the latter for two reasons: a smaller teaching load, and first-class mountains nearby.  I fully intended to return to the Survey after a few years, but I never did, and I have never regretted the choice.  For all its “iffy” weather, Bellingham turned out to be the best place on earth – at least for me. 

So, I moved upward through the ranks at WWU swiftly, mainly because I was publishing lots of papers.  I was a good teacher, but never a truly outstanding one.  I like to think that this was because my proclivities and talents bent naturally toward the research aspect of the job, at the expense of all the other parts.  I was a lousy participant in “university governance”, as all those committees were called.  I met my classes and did a good job, although my best teaching probably was with graduate students.  I started at WWU in 1969 and retired at the end of 1997.  I received the first Outstanding Researcher award, in 1984, but I never was the Outstanding Teacher, although I was nominated a few times.

I was fortunate enough to secure quite a few National Science Foundation grants, which allowed me to do field work nearly every summer (and also to evade the financial necessity of teaching summer school.)  Here are some of the places I have worked (this list includes field work for the USGS.)  In chronological order:  the Appalachians, the Great Lakes area, Colorado, Washington, Oregon and California, Nevada, Colombia, Chile and Argentina, the Caribbean (Barbados, Granada, Tobago, St Vincent and the Grenadines), and Greece (the islands of Lemnos, Lesbos and Samothraki).  Of these, the work in Washington and Oregon probably was the most significant, but the trips to Greece and Chile were the most fun!    

Note that all this travel, while remunerative in several ways, also was hard work.  For example, in South America one did not stay in fancy resorts or eat gourmet meals off linen tablecloths.  Rather, one slept in tents or crappy rooming houses and ate stuff one could cook.  Yes, we had some blow-out meals, but mostly it was tough beef, bread, and rot-gut red wine.  Also, showers could be scarce and sporadic – and drilling rock is a muddy business.  More than once I have gone for a week without changing my underwear – but you didn’t want to know that.  Suffice it to say that we knew where all the hot springs were in southern Chile.

Okay, 1500 words already and you are getting bored.  Let me tell you, nutshell-like, what all this research was about.  Fundamentally it was aimed at understanding the birth and evolution of mountain ranges.   How paleomagnetism can contribute to this is, as authors frequently say when they don’t want to get side-tracked, “beyond the scope of this review”.  In another nutshell - paleomagnetism sometimes can indicate how a particular block of rock has moved – rotated, moved north or south, or both – since it formed.  Thus we have shown that pieces of the west coast of North America have move northwestward along the continental margin by large distances in the last 100 million years or so.  By contrast, using the same technique it can be demonstrated that similar pieces of the western edge of South America have not moved either north or south, but rather have rotated in place like ball bearings.  Observations such as these then open up tempting vistas for speculation about how and why these things occurred, and I have always been addicted to speculation.

One might say that this novel way we used paleomagnetism was a new and logical outgrowth of plate tectonics.  It was moderately important, and continues to be.  None of us won the Nobel Prize, for sure, but at least we didn’t have to teach Geology 101 during the summer to keep bread on the table.  And it was fun.

Memoir 12: More mountains

Middle Fork Lake

Wind River Range, Wyoming

MORE MOUNTAINS

Some people appear to have enjoyed my first “Mountains” effort and have asked for more.  So, here is more.  I like writing about these things; they bring back very pleasant memories. 

There will be little or no organization in this chapter, merely yarns as they pop into my mind. 

Remember Walnut, and one of the things I didn’t like about her?  Well, one day Hansen and I were hiking in the Winds while Walnut, as she always did, ran in every direction, exploring.  After one of these exploratory expeditions she returned to us, happy as only a dog can be, reeking of long-dead animal!  She must have found one –  maybe a dead deer (or a long-dead hiker – we never investigated) and joyfully rolled in it.  She smelled so awful that we couldn’t let her within ten feet of us, except for a few seconds. The expressions such as “putrid, revolting – and let’shoot her” came to mind.   What to do?

Well, Walnut dearly liked to fetch sticks, and she also loved to swim.  We tossed sticks for her into many lakes all over the Winds; she would fetch until nearly dead from exhaustion.  Thor had some bio-degradable liquid soap in a small bottle.  Walnut was Thor’s dog, not mine, so he had to discharge the dirty work.  He would heave a stick into a nearby lake, Walnut would retrieve it and come back, sopping wet.  Thor would promptly soap her up, and then toss the stick again – ad infinitum.  After about an hour and a half-bottle of soap we had a dog we could live with.  Yes, bad for the environment, I know.  Have you ever smelled dead goat? 

One more Walnut story.   

Hansen and I would hike in the Winds for a week or ten days at a time.  (Before Thor, I hiked there with Bob Keller a few times, but those trips were mostly uneventful.)  When Thor and I camped we each had our own shelter.  I had a nice one-person backpack tent; Thor, being too big for most tents, would build a “shelter” consisting of a tarp strung between tent pegs.  Walnut snuggled up next to Thor.  Well, one morning it settled in to rain steadily – not hard, but steadily.  We each had a book, so we, too, settled in, to read and wait it out.  Walnut, of course, could not read, and furthermore did not care a shriveled fig about rain.  So, every so often she would appear at the door to my tent, whining pitifully – she wanted to go for a hike.  Well, after a few hours I couldn’t stand being tented anymore either, so I put on rain gear, a hat, and took off – Walnut at my heels.  (Hansen, sensibly, stayed in bed.) 

From the map I knew that there was a unique geographical feature called Two Oceans Lake a few miles away, on the ridge top.  The ridge formed part of the continental divide.  We worked our way (uncomfortably) up the ridge to that famous lake.  It occupied a wide spot in a low part of the ridge. It was fed by water flowing down the higher rocks on either side.  It was hauntingly strange; on two sides it seemed to have no bank.  You might compare it to a two-sided infinity pool.  Walnut immediately bagged it (jumped in and swam across).  For my part I contemplated the curious fact that, if I peed in that lake, half would end up in the Gulf of Mexico and the other half in the Los Angeles water supply!   I didn’t of course: not environmentally friendly.  I took some pictures but seem to have lost them.   On the way back I found a hat, which I still have.  It is hanging in the basement, next to my now sadly neglected ice ax. 

So, how about a Keller story?  You must realize that Bob Keller was, by any reasonable assessment, totally irrational – essentially insane - where mountains were concerned.  You also need to know that, with regard to mountains, he could talk me into anything by intimating through words and body language that I was a wuss.  In the winter we here in God’s Country sometimes experience “northers”.  The wind blows from the north, the sun shines ferociously, and it is very cold.  This particular winter I had just bought two pairs of snowshoes.  Bob suggested that we drive my car up to the Twin Lakes road, and then use my snowshoes to hike (about eight miles) to Twin Lakes.  The snow cover was complete, and deep.  The temperature might have been 15⁰   We started before dawn, parked at the base of the road, and slogged our way to up to the lakes (frozen, of course, and deeply snow-covered.)  I thought that was sufficient adventure, but – there still being daylight – Bob suggested that we try to climb Winchester Mountain, which was 1000 to 1500 ft. directly above the lakes.  Of course!  We floundered up the lower part of the ridge with the snowshoes, then abandoned them and essentially swam through the snow to the top of the damned peak.  By then it was getting dark.  We glissaded back down to the snowshoes, put them on, and headed for home.  The car was eight miles away, and dinner and a warm bed were about 50 more.

Without question, I have never been so tired in my life.  I staggered down the Twin Lakes road, weaving from side to side, nearly going off the edge from time to time.  I am fairly certain that I went to sleep more than once.  Keller, of course, refused to admit even mild distress.  So, anyway, we got to the car, somehow drove home, and survived.  Our wives had notified the authorities.  Not the first time that had happened, nor the last. 

How about another Keller story?  Bob was a minimalist where most things were concerned, and this applied to mountain equipment as well.  On one of our first backpack trips into the Winds, therefore, we carried only one tent.  It was a tiny more-or-less plastic thing that Bob had picked up for next to nothing somewhere.  Its virtues were that it was cheap, light and thus easy to carry, and also easy to  assemble.  Its faults were that it was barely wide enough for the both of us – and that, as it turned out, it leaked.  This we found out on our first night at Middle Fork Lake, when the mountain gods saw fit to dump sheets of rain on us all night long.  The next morning we were freezing and completely drenched, our sleeping bags were soggy and weighed about 50 lbs., and we were faced with a clear choice – find shelter, or high-tail it for home.  Having driven a thousand miles and hiked in for two days, we chose the former.  All we could find was a perfectly terrible little cave – maybe five feet deep, two feet high, wide enough for two only at its bottom end – and sloping downward toward the open sky, and the rain.  Moreover, it narrowed as it went in, meaning that you either crawled in head first, requiring you to breath the other guy’s exhalings all night long, or went in feet first, assuring that, as you inexorably slid down the incline during the night, your face would be the first thing exposed to the elements.  We called that cave “home” for about a week.  Luckily it didn’t rain much after that.  I think we held a ceremonial burning of that tent when we hit civilization.  If not, we should have.  I have been back to Middle Fork Lake with Hansen several times since then and I have searched for that cave.  Never found it.  Maybe God was teaching us a lesson, and, having done so, took the cave away.

Are you bored with Keller, Hansen and Walnut yet?  What, you want more?  Okay, here is another staring both dog and master.  On one trip Thor, Walnut and I were returning from a particularly arduous set of adventures.  We had clamored over so much hard rock that poor Walnut’s pads were worn raw.  So much did she suffer that on one occasion Thor stayed behind with her while I climbed Mt. Hooker.  If he had come along, inevitably so would she, with consequences that might have required us to improvise a litter and carry her out to civilization – and we were two days in.  Anyway, we babied her as well as we could and her feet seemed to heal.  (Of course, there was no way – short of a rope – that we could have induced her to stay in camp while we went off on an adventure.)

 Heck, I remember one time that Walnut, sore feet and all, saved the day:  Thor and I became separated: one or the other of us (I’d like to think it was him) had missed the trail.  However, Walnut knew where we both were – and would run back and forth between us. Finally Thor, I think, got the idea of making her a messenger dog – we tied notes to her collar, and made a connection.

Anyway, we were on our way out, and Walnut, as was the custom, carried the accumulated trash in a doggy pack.  It wasn’t heavy and she was a big dog, but she hated this duty – especially when her feet weren’t completely right.  The morning of the last day before what I thought of as “beer, bath and Bellingham”, we were breaking camp while she prowled around in the brush.  Thor called her, and she knew with an awful canine certainty that the dreaded trash pack was in her immediate future.  She came slowly creeping from out the willows, belly almost dragging the ground, with the most pitiful look of misery and desolation on her face.  When she finally reached us she flopped over on her back and held up her (probably still slightly uncomfortable) paws.  Thor and I burst into applause; we knew an Academy Award performance when we saw one.  An hour later she was running around – with pack – as if nothing had ever happened.

I miss Walnut.

So, is that enough?  No?  Well, how about one last Keller story?

Bob was, without doubt, the quintessential mountain man.  I think that the only thing that stood between him and a Himalayan climbing expedition was the fact that – he could not easily tolerate high elevations!  When he reached about 10,000 ft. invariably his system would rebel, and he would need to spend 24 to 36 hours lying in his tent, belching up bile.  We learned that early on, so for Wind River back-pack trips we always counted on hiking vigorously to 10,000 ft. or slightly above and setting up camp at an interesting spot with fishing potential.  Thus I could amuse myself while Bob wrestled with his intestinal demons.  By at least the third day he would be fine and ready to go; after that, I would have trouble keeping up with him.  I tell you this by way of background to the story of our Sierra Nevada adventure, which begins now. 

Recall that I described Bob Keller as a “minimalist”.  This applied especially to transportation; he hated cars, he hated driving cars, he hated buying gasoline for cars.  He especially loathed new cars; I guess that the average age of any motor vehicle Bob has ever owned is about 15.  Maybe that explains why we hitch-hiked to California, to challenge the mighty Sierra Nevada.

It seems that a minor pleasure of Bob’s early mountaineering career was putting Californians in their place.  He boasted that he had walked many Sierra Nevada hikers into the ground, and I have no doubt that he had.  He couldn’t walk me into the ground, but he tried – and sometimes nearly succeeded.  He could walk faster than me, but I could keep going forever, so I always caught up.  Maybe that sparked a little interest in the Sierra.

I had told him many times about back-packing in the Sierra.  It really was great, if you avoided the mosquitoes.  Or it was great, back before the population of California began to approach that of Germany.  Nowadays I suspect you have to make a reservation just to park your vehicle at a trail head.  Anyway, Bob developed a curiosity, and we planned a trip.  The only problem, really, was that he didn’t want to drive that far.  Thus it was that we took a bus to Reno, stayed overnight with a friend – and hitch-hiked the rest of the way!  It took a long time and was boring as hell, but – by golly – we didn’t waste any money on gasoline!  So, after about five days, we were finally at a trail head on the east side of the Sierra, ready for our adventure, and that morning we took off. 

Well, you may know that the east face of the Sierra is very steep, very dry, and very rocky – which is why anyone who can approaches the high country from the west.  Not us, by God!  We climbed like heck for about 12 hours, and finally found ourselves in a beautiful meadow with a stream, the high peaks only a few miles away.  It might have been 11,000 ft.  You can guess what happened next.

Bob couldn’t move the next day, nor most of the subsequent day.  However, we had to get a move on; we needed to cross the range and hook up with a trail on the other side.  Then we were going to head south until there was another pass, cross back to the east side, and hitch-hike home.  We were under some sort of time constraints; I don’t remember why.

So, on the third day Bob could walk, but he couldn’t carry his pack.  That meant that I had to carry my pack to the foot of this very steep-sided little col, with snow on both sides, then go back and bring Bob’s pack along.  And finally I had to get him and our packs across.  There is no trail over this “pass”.  (Since I wrote these words I did some research, and I am reasonably certain that what we crossed was called Lamarck Col.  It leads directly into Darwin Lakes, and eventually Evolution Basin.   From the topo map is looks fairly awful.  You can Google it and see some pictures.)

So, anyway, we finally descended to Evolution Basin, picked up the John Muir trail (nowadays there may be traffic circles on that much loved footpath), and headed south.  We had no more adventures that I remember, until we got back on pavement.

Hitching back to Reno and the bus, however, constituted our most dangerous adventure of all.  Two women in a pick-up truck with a rudimentary camper top, probably mother and daughter, picked us up and let us ride in back.  Every few miles the younger one would turn around, open a little window between cab and truck-bed, and offer us a hit on the whiskey bottle they were sharing.  This went on for at least two hundred miles!  They drove fast, there were some steep drop-offs on that highway, and lots of traffic.  Thank you, Lord!  That was the last time I ever hitched a ride, my last time in the Sierra, and the last time I let Keller talk me into something quite so stupid!

Well, okay, the computer tells me that I am on page 5 and have written the equivalent of a moderate-sized short-story, so it is obviously time to quit.   I think I will go outside, drive to a high place somewhere, and stare at Mt. Baker.

What, you say?  You want one more Keller story?  Well, okay.  I was again helping him teach his “Mountains” class, and we again were planning to climb the Twin Sisters.  The difference this time was that we had only several grown men as “students”.  It was raining lightly.  We spent a night at the foot of the North Twin, in an old cabin at the edge of something called Daley Prairie, which is a soggy meadow just west of the mountain.  (We shared the cabin with several young men from Lynden – a very religious sort of town – who tried to convince us that the 2^nd Coming was in progress and the world was about to end.)  The next day we started up, me leading.  About half way up the west ridge we came to a “gendarme”, which is a fancy mountaineer’s term for an awkward, upward-projecting chunk of rock that impedes progress.  Bob, of course, wanted to climb over it, but I was leading and I wanted to go around.  There was a steep snowfield on the north side of the ridge, and I liked to climb on snow – so I stepped out onto the snow field, planted my ice ax - and promptly slipped, lost my grip on the ax, and found myself sliding downhill on my back, head first.  It was about 1500 ft. to the bottom of that snowfield, and I had just about managed to formulate the thought “what a stupid way to die” – when I struck some protruding rocks, the only ones in sight.  Again: Thank you, Lord!  I managed to pussy-foot my way back up to the ridge, retrieve my ice ax – and relinquish the lead to Bob.  Not ten minutes later he was clamoring up a loose rock shoot and, foolishly, I put my head out to see how he was doing.  At that instant a rock the size of a soccer ball came whizzing past my head! 

Good Lord, what is going on?  I had almost died twice in about ten minutes!  I may not be very smart, but I could certainly see that some Higher Power was saying something like: “Get the hell off this mountain and stop putting your life at risk!”  I have never done anything remotely resembling technical climbing since.

Memoir 11: of Mountains and Me

This is not me

Getting to the top of high places has been one my favorite recreational activities since I was about 13 years old.  I haven’t been on the top of anything significant for at least fifteen years now, but that still gives me nearly 60 years of “mountaineering”.  In that time I seem to have accumulated a wealth of “exciting” stories, most of them scrupulously true.  Possibly to stop me from repeating them over and over again, several people have suggested that I write them down.  That’s what I plan to do here.

First of all: I was never a “technical” mountaineer; that is, although I carried a rope and ice ax on many occasions, I did my very best not to need them.  If there was an easy, safe, unexciting way around an obstacle, I took it.  I used ropes and crampons a few times on Mt. Baker and elsewhere, and a rope on a few other climbs where there was lots of “relief” (a long way down, right next to you).  I carried my ice ax nearly all the time, partly as a balancing device (like the cane I use now), and partly to look cool.  Also, I liked to ascend and descend snow fields, and for that one needs an ice ax.  So, to summarize, I was never an intrepid scaler of steep rock and ice; to my regret I never even tried to climb Mt. Shuksan, because it looked too “technical”. The hardest thing I ever climbed probably was Mt. Hooker, in Wyoming – and that is simply a long, difficult scramble.   No one ever tried to recruit me for a Himalayan expedition.

But I spend a lot of time in the mountains.  In chronological order, I have hiked or “climbed” in the San Bernardino Mountains of California, the San Juan Mountains of south-central Colorado, the Sierra Nevada, the Alps, the Wind River Range in Wyoming, and the North Cascades.  Working, I spent some time in the Andes, but I never did much beyond dragging the drilling equipment a few hundred meters to the sampling site. Of all these, the memories of the Winds give me the most pleasure.

I have done quite a lot of solo messing around in the mountains (don’t do it, kids, it really is dangerous), but mostly I had partners.  I will describe two of them.

 First there was Bob Keller.  Keller was (and remains) the sub-category of Homo sapiens that I least understand.  In the mountains he was fearless, reckless, skilled, and foolish.  At least 90% of the times that I almost died in the mountains I was with Keller.  Many of the stories below will involve him.

I also hiked and backpacked many times with Thor Hansen.  Hansen was my colleague in the WWU Geology Department.  He was 6 ft. 6 in tall, strong, relatively unskilled, and eager.  He was the anti-Keller; he was at least as cautious as me and sometimes maybe a trifle more so.  He was a good camp cook and carried a big pack often stuffed with good things to eat and drink.

 

Most of the time that I hiked with Hansen he took along his dog, a female German Shepard named Walnut.  For reasons we can ignore for now, I am not big on dogs.  Walnut, however, was a “dog amongst dogs” –nearly the ideal hiking companion.  On backpack trips she carried her dog food in, and our trash out.  She was game for just about anything, although she had to wimp out a few times when her foot pads had been rubbed raw by walking on rough rock.  There were, however, three things I didn’t like about Walnut: her tendency to lick my ear while sitting in the back seat on our trips to Wyoming; her insane delight at finding dead animals to roll in; and the fact that often, while I was puzzling over a way to get up a steep spot, she would suddenly appear above me, looking smug.  Walnut has been dead for a long time, but she still is my favorite dog – and she wasn’t even mine.

Okay, now some tales:

While I was in graduate school at Stanford (roughly 1958-1961) I often back-packed with a guy named Bill Clement, who was a fellow grad student in the geophysics department.  We went into the Sierra Nevada – to catch fish.  We never thought of climbing anything; there are no trout on the tops of mountains.  We usually went early in the season – mid to late June.  The advantage of that time-period is that the fish are hungry, and eating flies, which is how we fished.  The disadvantages, however, are many: clouds of mosquitoes, frequent rain, and flooded river crossings.  We didn’t carry a tent, because Clement prided himself on his ability to build lean-tos.  This led to us getting drenched more than once.  And, of course, we used wood for fuel – I didn’t even own a back-pack stove at the time and neither, I believe, did Bill.  (We also drank the water directly out of streams.  No boiling, no filters, no foul-tasting additives.  Eat your hearts out, all you young mountain bums!)  We caught oodles of trout, and ate them – even though, after my Lake City days’ – I dreaded them.  In the evening we usually had several cups of tea, with lots of sugar, liberally laced with rum.  The negative to all this joy was, of course – mosquitoes.  They had a density of about 1 million bugs per cubic meter.  During the day (they sleep by night, mostly) you didn’t dare expose skin.  Fishing, hiking, camp chores all were done wearing a mosquito net.  Clement used to fantasize about contrivances that would kill them when they got nearby.  We used buckets of repellant (futile).  We cursed a lot.  I am surprised we ever did go into those mountains that early in the summer, but we did.  Repeatedly. 

One trip into the Sierra with Clement and two other guys I fell a little behind, missed the trail, and ended up – lost.  As it got dark I climbed a steep boulder for safety (what was I afraid of?  Bears?  Wolves?) and spent a miserable night.  The next day it began to absolutely pour down rain.  I retraced my errant steps, found the trail, and high-tailed it for the car.  I was there when the others arrived, nearly drowned.  They were relieved to see me, but also thoroughly pissed off.  It seems that the rum was in my pack.

Now why did I start with the Sierra?  My first mountain experiences were in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, while we were at The Cabin.  I had my first back-pack experience there – we went to Crystal Lake, about five miles (and 2000 vertical feet) in.  Big trout.  I climbed nearby Crystal Peak, which was a walk up but over 12,000 ft. high.  I think that was my first real peak.  Many years later I climbed all of the “14ers” in that area.  They were mostly walk-ups, too.  The tallest is Mt. Uncompaghre , at 14,321 ft.  I still love that peak.  I must have been on top of it a half-dozen times.  The view is stupendous.

I should mention that my mountaineering career (and my life) almost ended when I was about 13 and got myself stuck on a rock face about a half-mile above the cabin.  I had to figure out how to get down: nobody would have found me before I had died of thirst or had gone to sleep and fallen.  By dumb luck there was a dead tree leaning on the cliff.  I managed to slither horizontally across the rock and reach the tree.  Then I shinnied down.  I got home very much cut up and bleeding.  I never quite told my mother what I had done.  She would have forbidden me to go off and my own, and I would have been forced to disobey her!

At about that same time I was scrambling around in the San Bernardino Mountains of Southern California.  Together with Stan Livingston I walked my way to the tops of the two highest mountains in the area, Mt. San Gorgonio and Mt. San Jacinto.  No hair-raising tales of near death or stupidity came out of those excursions.  They merely whetted my appetite for getting to the top of mountains.  Stan later did some serious climbing, with some well-known mountaineers of that era.

So now let’s turn to the Cascades.  The weather there is so unpredictable that nobody in his or her right mind plans to use them for long back-pack trips.  That applies to me, too – you could count all the nights I have slept in the North Cascades on your fingers and toes, and have some digits left over.  Mostly we did day hikes, starting very early and sometimes going very, very late.  Most of these hikes were done with Keller or Hansen, although quite a few I soloed. 

Some notable triumphs and near fiascos:

Let’s start with something heroic.  Every year for at least ten years I hiked out to the Copper Mountain lookout in the North Cascade National Park, sometimes more than once per year.   It was considered a three-day back pack, but we would do it in one day.  Nominally it is 23 miles round trip, with an aggregate elevation gain of about 6500 ft.  We would leave Bellingham by 6:00 am, be at the trail head about 7:30 – and start walking, as fast as we could.  I hate to admit such juvenile silliness, but the object here was to do the trip faster than the time before.  Our times usually were about nine hours.  We would eat lunch and drink a beer at the lookout, and we subtracted the time we spent there.  I did the trip with Keller, with Hansen (and Walnut, of course), and a few times solo.  The Copper Mountain hike is a splendid scenic experience, but – of course – we were so intent on breaking records that we scarcely ever stopped to enjoy the view. 

  

The Bear Story certainly needs to be told.  (I have told it orally so many times that it will be new to practically nobody.)  One September Keller and I set out to climb Mt. Challenger, which is a moderately nasty peak in the North Cascades National Park.  This entailed a two-day hike in, followed by a traverse of a small glacier – just to reach the bottom of the thing.  It may not have been very difficult from there, but we never found out – in crossing the Whatcom glacier we were nearly killed by an ice fall.  It was just a little ice fall, but it scared the Holy bejeebers out of me all the same.  Keller, true to form, wanted to continue but I would have nothing to do with it.  It really was too late in the season – but, of course, that just added to its attraction for Keller. 

Anyway, we backed off the glacier and started to set up camp at the first patch of grass.  Bob went down toward the trail in search of water, while I set up the tent.  He came back a few minutes later, looking disturbed, and said “Better move camp.  There is a bear down on the trail, eating somebody’s’ pack!

So, we circled way around, cut down to the trail, hoisted our packs into a tree, and went back up the trail to see what the bear was about.  There it was, furry black, fat and happy, sitting in the trail with a pack in its lap – eating away.  I hollered “Is there somebody here?” and a quavering voice came back “Yes, and I’m in trouble!” So, then a big kid with long blond hair, a pair of shorts, some million-dollar hiking boots – and nothing else – climbed down out of a nearby tree.  He had been up there throwing rocks at the bear, which of course simply ignored him.  He had shucked his pack in the trail and taken a quick detour to a pair of lakes some few hundred feet above.  He left his pack on the ground, near the trail. After all, he was going to be back in an hour or so.   Bad mistake!

Seems the kid had just graduated from USC and was – in the parlance of the time (this was about 1975) spending the summer hiking around “getting his shit together.”  This was to be his last hike of the summer – his sister would be waiting at the trail head to pick him up.  As you will see, it might actually have been his last hike, ever.

So, Kid, as we will call him, immediately grabbed my ice ax and asked “If I hit him with this, do you think he will give my pack back?”  One of us gave the obvious answer, “If you hit him with this you won’t need your pack, ever again.”  Agreeing, Kid took my ice ax and Bob’s metal canteen, went up to within about 15 ft. of the bear, and began banging the two together while bouncing back and forth and yelling “Ho, bear!  Give me back my *&%@#$*& pack!”  And other words of that nature.  Naturally the bear thought this was just good dinner entertainment; he would look on for a while, and then rip open another compartment of the pack.  Finally we persuaded Kid to accompany us to a hut a few miles down the trail, to spend the night.  We fed him, lent him our extra warm clothing (however, he was about 6 ft. 3 in. tall, so nothing fit), built a big fire – and went to sleep.   The next morning he was gone.  While we were eating breakfast he appeared, with what was left of his pack – which was, surprisingly, a lot.  Naturally all the food was gone, but lots of other stuff was intact.  We gave him all the food we could spare (a big block of cheese), and sent him on his way.  He must have found his sister, because I never learned of any dead bodies lying near the trail.  We went on to nearly get killed climbing Easy(!) Ridge and get perfectly stymied by Perfect Impasse, while trying another route to Challenger.  You can look all these geographic terms up in Beckey’s Guide.

Another moral, kiddies: Always put your pack somewhere a bear can’t get at it, even if you’re only going to be gone for a few minutes.\

My God!, this is getting out of hand.  I will strive to be brief – but it is hard, because I enjoy these tales so much.

Bob Keller taught a class on Mountains: how to climb them, how to behave while in them, mountain environment, and the Zen of being terrified – stuff like that.  (He taught at Fairhaven College, where you could teach anything you wanted as long as you could scare up a few students to listen.  Oh, the tales I could tell – but this is about mountains.)  On several occasions he asked me to help (on climbs), and I was so eager to get into the mountains that I agreed.  One time we took a bunch of beginners up the North Twin Sister, which has a safe-enough but nasty-looking west ridge, up which most people climb.  Two girls became so traumatized that they were effectively petrified; neither could move unless there was one of us “instructors” right in front of them.  Bob sent the non-petrified students down with a third instructor, while he and I each took one of the girls in hand and coaxed her, step-by step, off that mountain.  The non-traumatized students got to the cars about sunset, went home, and enjoyed a fine dinner.   Bob and I delivered our terrified waifs to the bottom of the ridge by about 1:30 the next morning.  (Thank God for head lamps!)   The authorities had been alerted, of course – our wives could never believe that we might survive such demonstrations of unmitigated stupidity.   To this day I don’t understand how Keller, and Fairhaven College, survived this and similar episodes.   There were several other trips that should have got both of us killed, or at least fired.  Buy me a beer and ask.

I doubt if either of those girls ever went within ten miles of a mountain, ever again.

One time on Winchester Mountain in the North Cascades (above Twin Lakes), I very nearly lost the boyfriend (of the moment) of my middle-daughter Linda.  Tim Cross was his name, and he was bound and determined to show me that he was man enough for my daughter.  He did this by ignoring my warnings and getting stuck on a steep, icy snow field, about 1000 ft. above the lower Twin Lake – with not a hell of a lot but air in between.  Just as I came up to the scene, he fell.  God must have been in a mood to preserve idiots, because the strap on his pack hooked onto a small rock a few feet down, and stopped him.  This required me to work my way down the damned icy snow field, get below him, get him on his feet, and direct him back to the path.  I am not one to relish steep icy slopes and gigantic relief, so this was very unpleasant.  I hustled him to the Emergency Room in Bellingham: nothing wrong but a slightly bruised ego, apparently.  He was maybe 16 at the time.  If it had been me I would have died of fright.

I should tell a Hansen story.  One character flaw of mine continually got me in trouble: the belief that I could scope out feasible cross-country routes in the mountains using only a topographic map.  On one trip to the Winds I mapped out a heroic big loop, only part of which used trails.  Thor was skeptical, but looked up to me as the wise old man of the mountains.  This “route” required us to climb one pass, branch off and traverse some high country, scramble up what seemed (from the map) likely to be an easy slope, regain another trail and circle back to camp.  Maybe 15 miles, with no more than 3000 ft. of elevation gain.  Piece of cake!

Well, one should always remember that a map with a contour interval of, say, 40 ft. potentially conceals lots of problems that are 20 or 30 ft. high.  And there were many, many of them.  By mid-afternoon we were still not half-way there and we were exhausted.  I really can’t remember how we got back to camp, only that we were too tired to cook dinner.  The rum came in handy, though. 

Well, heck, I have dozens of more tales of adventure and near death in the mountains, but this thing is over 3000 words and climbing fast, so I will stop here.  If you want more, come to my house, sit at my knee, give me a sweet tea laced with rum – and I will oblige.

To end:  Next to my family and to Linda especially, I love mountains more than anything else in life.  One of my principal regrets today is that I have become too old to properly appreciate them.  But I am grateful for the years, and the experiences, that I did have.