Sign on a shop.

Here we see one of countless banners displayed around the city.

A creature from the movie.

An arrow.

A display in a shop window.

The tower of Sauron (Barad-Dûr)

A postage stamp

Items for sale in a shop.

A clever poster.

Another clever poster.

It was quite impressive seeing all of this in celebration of the movie, especially since I was a big fan of the Trilogy.

Snowshoes on Mt. Baldy

Back in the 1980s, I was attempting to climb the highest point of each of Arizona’s 15 counties. One cold morning, on November 23rd of 1986, I found myself at the start of a trail. It led to the top of Mt. Baldy, the highest peak of the White Mountains. I had driven miles of snowy roads to get to the trailhead. I had with me in the car a pair of Sherpa snowshoes, a holdover from my climbing days in British Columbia, and I didn’t have to wait long before putting them on. The trail starts at 9,200 feet and soon the snow became deeper. The Sherpas had a serrated cleat under your boot, and it came in handy on icier stretches of the trail. All in all, I was glad I had brought them, as all of the miles to the summit (just over 11,400 feet) were deep in snow. It may have been the only time I ever really needed them for any climb in Arizona.

Runaway Horses

Many years ago, my neighbor across the street told me he had horses boarded at a stable at the edge of town, and would I like to come with him and ride one of them. I had never ridden a horse, so I thought it might be fun. Once I was aboard my horse, he told me not to do anything but hang on and enjoy the ride. There were 3 of us, and the other 2 who were experienced riders soon had their steeds going along at a merry clip. My horse simply followed theirs. They built up speed and mine followed. Things soon got out of control, and I was smacking into tree branches along the way. It was quite terrifying, really, and all I could do was to hang on for dear life. By the time our ride ended, it was all I could do to dismount and sit down and try to regain my composure. What an ordeal, one I swore I’d never repeat!

I had one other experience with a runaway horse. In the 1980s, I was climbing in the New River Mountains. I had just finished a climb and was moving down the valley, walking along a road. I topped a rise, and there’s a horse, all saddled up, sans rider, running up the road towards me. Then I saw a woman on a horse crossing a hill, shouting to me “Stop that horse!” By then, he has passed me. I ran after him, shouting “whoa” and whistling at him. He didn’t stop. The woman galloped past me and shouted “Thanks for trying”. Hell, I wouldn’t have a clue as to how to stop a runaway horse if my life depended on it. A mile later, I met her son, horseless – he was walking up the road towards where the woman and the runaway were. I moved on, continuing south on Road 37.

The only other time I sat upon an equine turned out to be a much better experience. I was climbing in Argentina, and a group of army soldiers were camped nearby and getting ready to head up into the high mountains. Their lieutenant made me an offer I couldn’t refuse – since they were heading to the same destination, I could put all my gear on one mule and ride on another. He said it’d be a slow plod, nothing dramatic. I agreed, and it was a really nice experience lasting several hours. The mule took me up almost 5,000 vertical feet over a distance of many miles on trails before the soldiers dropped me off. I still look back on the experience as totally positive.

Plaza de Mulas Hotel

In February of 1990, I made an attempt to climb Cerro Aconcagua. While I was at the base camp on the Ruta Normal, at a place called Plaza de Mulas, I saw helicopters flying in and out to a spot only a kilometer away. They were ferrying materials in to build a hotel. It seemed like an amazing undertaking. The building site sat an an elevation of 14,338 feet. I returned to Plaza de Mulas in December of the same year and saw that the hotel seemed mostly built. I heard from others that you could pay a fee to make a phone call from there. After my successful climb to the summit, once back down to base camp, I walked over to the hotel on January 2nd. In their office, they had a 2-way radio which could connect to the telephone system. It seemed kind of rustic and the connection was really poor, but they patched a call through for me to Tucson, Arizona. I left a message on the answering machine for my wife, telling her that I had made the summit. The hotel charged me 10 dollars US for a 3-minute call.

I never returned to Aconcagua, but I did learn that the hotel operated through the 1990s and finally closed for good in 2009. Apparently, it was poorly designed. For example, the pipes for the plumbing kept freezing and bursting, never having been designed to operate in the year-around freezing temperatures. The cost of maintaining the hotel was outrageously high and couldn’t be sustained. It was said, though, that while it lasted, it was the highest hotel in the world – at least, that was their claim. The building still stands there to this day, unused and probably in poor shape, a testament to poor planning.

Fleeing the Lightning

As I stood on the summit of a peak in Utah, at an elevation of 11,525 feet, what had been clear skies only minutes before started to darken. Clouds seemed to form out of nowhere, and the first raindrops spattered. I had to cover 2 miles to get back to my truck, fortunately along a trail on the ridge top. The first crack of lightning sounded awfully close, and I realized how exposed I was. The ridge was all above tree-line. As I continued, there were more flashes and loud booms, and I prayed that none of them would hit me. I fairly flew, and covered the distance back to my truck in record time. Even so, I counted seven thunderclaps in those 2 miles and I couldn’t seem to move fast enough. I only breathed a sigh of relief when I reached my truck, parked in a pass at 10,485 feet. I had barely reached it when the clouds melted away and the sun came out once again.

Wet Beach Camp

It was a stormy night in a New Zealand winter. I had hitched a ride, but the driver told me that he’d soon drop me off out in the middle of nowhere, as he had to soon head off in a direction different from the one I was traveling. He said not to worry, though, as it was just a short walk over to a sandy beach where I could camp freely. He left me there by the roadside. It was raining, and not just raining but a downpour of biblical proportions. I used my headlamp to find my way through a belt of brush until a reached the beach, a short distance away. The waves were crashing in from the Tasman Sea as I stood there trying to figure out what I should do next. Fortunately, I was wearing raingear as I took my tent out of my pack. It was a struggle to set it up in the strong wind and driving rain but I got it done. By the time I climbed in with the rest of my gear, I was soaked to the arse, and my sleeping bag hadn’t fared too well either. I spent a miserable night and was glad to see the first light of day. Of the 31 days I spent in New Zealand that winter, I got rained on for 29 of them.

Mountaineering Toothache

Did you ever think that a toothache could end a climb? It has happened, even on big climbs like ones in the Himalaya. It happened to me once in the Canadian Rockies. In August of 1981, I met up with Ross and Phil at the Columbia Icefields. After a night spent there in the campground, we set out the next morning up the Athabasca Glacier. A couple of hours later, we had climbed up on to the main body of the icefield itself. A day-long trudge brought us closer to our objective. After a night spent on the icefield, we trudged for hours over to Mount Columbia, the second-highest peak in the Canadian Rockies. It was a really long day spent trying to summit, but we failed and returned to our campsite of the previous night. The next morning, an ugly black thunderstorm rolled in from the west and gave us a real ass-kicking. After it passed, the skies cleared and we decided to go for the summit of nearby Snow Dome, a peak of 11,339 feet. It was a brutal slog up through deep snow but we reached the top by 1:30 in the afternoon. At that time, Phil said that he noticed that a tooth was starting to hurt him. We went back down to the icefield and camped for another night. Although we had grandiose plans to attack any of the other nearby high peaks, it didn’t pan out. Phil said that during the night, his toothache got worse – it was obvious he needed to get that taken care of. He was in pain as the 3 of us descended the Athabasca Glacier and made it back to our vehicles. Phil saw his dentist upon returning home on the coast and all was made well. It was a perfect example of how a toothache can change your plans in the mountains.